The project · Sources
Our sources
The references we read and cite, and why they matter.
Pizza Call runs on sources you can check: the style standards (AVPN for Neapolitan, Associazione Pizza Romana for the round Roman and pala), the time-and-temperature yeast model, flour-mill spec sheets for W values, and the food science behind dough. Below is each one, with a line on why it matters.
We don't make numbers up. Every quantity, every fermentation window and every W value on the site traces back to one of these references, and where it counts we cite it right in the article. Here's what we read, and why we trust it.
The styles and their standards
- Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana (AVPN) specification, and the EU Traditional Speciality Guaranteed "Pizza Napoletana" regulation. The Neapolitan standard: they set the permitted ingredients, the hydration band, salt in grams per litre of water, the ban on fat, and the method. They anchor our Neapolitan dough page.
- Associazione Pizza Romana. The reference for round Roman pizza, the thin, crisp kind rolled out with a pin. It keeps our Roman pages honestly distinct from Neapolitan, which is a different animal.
- Gabriele Bonci's published recipe. From him we take the figures of his home formula (40 g of extra-virgin olive oil per kilo of flour) and the credit for taking the teglia worldwide. For the pala, the reference is the Associazione Pizza Romana disciplinare instead.
The maths and the flour
- The time-and-temperature yeast model. The relationship, long established in Italian practice, between how much yeast you need, how many hours you have and at what temperature. Our calculator implements it and pins it with a regression test: if the numbers move, the build fails. Our W-by-hours table comes from the same model, and it's a rule of thumb rather than an official standard.
- Flour-mill technical specs (Caputo and Molino Dallagiovanna, for example). This is where the real W and P/L values come from, and it's what we cite whenever we name a specific flour.
The science of dough
- Modernist Bread and J. Kenji López-Alt's writing at Serious Eats. They explain what actually happens inside the dough: how gluten develops, what enzymes do during maturation, and why a long, slow rise builds so much more flavour than a fast one. Neither claims a long ferment makes pizza easier to digest, and neither do we: see the maturation guide for where we stand on that.
How we use them
We read the primary source, not a second-hand summary, and cite it at the foot of every article. How we turn these references into numbers is in our method; how we check, update and correct what we publish is in our editorial standards.