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Vera Pizza Napoletana Guidelines

There is a basic set of guidelines, or guiding principles, behind Vera Pizza Napoletana. As a restaurant owner, or home pizza maker, you can use these guidelines to your own advantage, treating them either as a starting point for creating your own unique and wonderful pizza recipes and techniques, or a more formal rules that you always follow. If your goal is to become a VPN-certified pizzeria, there are methods for demonstrating that your restaurant operates in full accordance with the rules.

All the Forno Bravo commercial wood burning ovens Professionale, RomaModena2G and  Napoli ovens, are designed for the 716ºF – 900ºF temperatures and 90-second pizza cooking times described by the Vera Pizza Napoletana guidelines.

Forno Bravo works closely with the North American Pizza and Culinary Academy, which provides pizzaiolo certification classes as an official branch of the Scuola Italiana Pizzaioli, the oldest and most prestigious pizza school located in Italy. Our cooking school locator and vetted consultants/dealers can also assist you in finding a Pizza Napoletana consulting service for both on-site and Internet-based kitchen design services and on-site Pizza Napoletana training. We can help you successfully launch a new pizzeria, and improve an existing pizzeria.

You can also read our English translation of the original Italian VPN Specification presented to the European Union in support of Denominazione D’Origine Controllata (DOC) status for VPN.

The Vera Pizza Napoletana Guidelines are:

1. A Wood Burning Oven:

Pizza Napoletana must be cooked in a wood fired, dome oven. Gas, coal or electric ovens, while capable of producing wonderful pizza, do not conform to the Pizza Napoletana tradition.

(*However, the newest VPN guideline states: “The use of a gas fire oven is allowed in the presence of documentation attesting to the impossibility of installing a wood-burning oven.)

2. Proper Ingredients:

Tipo 00 flour, San Marzano (plum) tomatoes, all natural Fior-di-Latte or Bufala mozzarella, fresh basil, salt and yeast. Only fresh, all-natural, non-processed ingredients are acceptable.

3. Proper Technique

Pizza dough kneaded either by hand or with a low-speed mixer. No mechanical dough shaping, such as a dough press or rolling pin, and proper pizza preparation. Pizza baking time should not exceed 90 seconds.

4. Proper Equipment

A proper work surface (usually a marble slab) and a wood fired oven operating at roughly 905ºF at the dome/716ºF – 806ºF at the cooking floor.

5. The Final Product: Pizza Napoletana

Pizza Napoletana is not larger than 14″ with a raised edge crust and thin (.11 inch) center. The pizza should be soft and elastic, and easily foldable, not hard or brittle.

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