The first thing that you want to do is you want to put your tomato onto your pizza dough—just spoon some tomato sauce on. The one thing that to caution about in making pizza is don’t top it heavily—that’s the biggest mistake that beginners make, and it ends up taking away from the balance of the flavors.

The important part of the pizza is the crust—you don’t want to smother the flavor of the crust by piling it high with too many toppings. So, spread the tomato around the pizza, so that you have left a nice thick edge around the outside of the pizza. That edge is going to rise nicely, and that’s called the corona of the pizza (bonus fun fact).

Next, you need to put some basil on to the pizza, including some whole basil leaves. For the very large pieces of basil, you can break them in half. Then you just need to top the pizza with some diced Mozzarella cheese, and that’s it.

You are going to put a little bit of salt, scatter it on top of the pizza, a little bit of oil, and you can put a little bit of black pepper, and there you have it. Just put it in the oven at 400 degrees for roughly 15 – 18 minutes, depending on your oven, and you should be all set.***