Making the Margherita Sbagliato was No Mistake!

It's  I loved the Netflix series "Chef's Table: Pizza." The episode with Franco Pepe, from north of Naples, was outstanding. 

What stood out was his Margherita Sbagliato, or "mistaken margherita" -- appropriate for me since I host a podcast and have written a book about making mistakes and learning from them.

Here's a video with Franco:

I decided to make the Margherita Sbagliato the other day, using my Ooni Koda 16 oven that's running on natural gas. I'm not at our home that has the wood-burning oven, but I'll repeat the experiment there.

I'll share some photos, a little bit about the process, and the reactions to this pizza from my family and guests.

I followed the recipe that's found on this page, from "Young and Foodish."

I made my dough pretty much as usual. I made my usual sauce, built on the foundation of a glass jar of Italian tomato puree.

The one special preparation was the basil oil sauce (the green that's seen in the Franco Pepe video).

I doubled the recipe, using 20 g of fresh basil, one ice cube, and 300 g of extra virgin olive oil. This turned out to be a much thinner liquid than the one in the video above. For future experiments, I'd use less oil to thicken it into more of a pesto consistency.

I stretched the dough and covered it with torn slices of mozzarella (other than the edge that's left uncovered for the cornicione (edge) of the pizza. And I drizzled some EVOO on top.

Into the oven (turned down to low):

I didn't have a stopwatch running, but here it is after about a minute:

A video of it:

And out... 

I could have had the oven running a little hotter. I say that because of the browning that occurred instead of doing the leopard spotting thing.

Then, it's time to use squeeze bottles to add lines or dots of 1) sauce and 2) the basil oil:

Here's the first one I had done earlier:

And here's the second one (the one pictured in the oven above). I liked Franco's direction to "play with the pizza" so there's a bit of a tic-tac-toe theme I guess:

It's a fun take on the classic Margherita. There's no evidence that it was born from a true "mistake" -- but it looks like one.

Instead of the base of sauce, it's a base of cheese. A true Margherita pizza is made with a more austere amount of cheese compared to a New York pizza that's covered in it over the sauce.

The basil oil had a great flavor. And the addition of room temperature sauce made it seem more concentrated in flavor. And you get the satisfying cheese bread texture and taste.

I would definitely do this again. It's a bit of a party trick. Perhaps a pizza people haven't had before. I could pretend like I made a mistake, LOL.

It was a hit. My mother-in-law said it's her new favorite pizza... enjoying it even more than my traditional Margherita!