Self-raising flour and thick yogurt, weighed rather than scooped, will give you a rollable pizza base in about four minutes with no proving. It will not give you the chew of a real pizza base, and anyone who tells you it does hasn’t eaten one recently. What it gives you is a thin, crisp, slightly biscuity flatbread that takes toppings well and gets from bowl to plate in ten minutes flat. On a Wednesday that’s the correct trade.
What the yogurt is doing that water can’t
Self-raising flour is plain flour with a raising agent already mixed through it, usually a bicarbonate plus an acid salt. Add plain water and it works, slowly, when it gets hot. Add yogurt and something starts happening at room temperature: yogurt is acidic, sitting somewhere around pH 4.4, and that acid meets the bicarbonate the moment the two touch and starts throwing off carbon dioxide straight away.
That’s the whole reason there’s no proving step. You’re not waiting for yeast to eat sugar and multiply over an hour or two. You’re getting a chemical reaction that’s already halfway done by the time you’ve finished kneading, and completely done a few minutes later.
Which cuts both ways. The gas is on a clock, and the clock started without asking you. A dough you mixed and then left on the counter for forty minutes while you dealt with something else will bake flatter and denser than one you rolled immediately. I’ve done it. It’s still edible, just tighter and more cracker-like.
Yogurt also brings fat and protein, and both soften the crumb. A flour-and-water flatbread of the same thinness goes hard and snappy. This one folds in half without cracking.
Weigh it, because cups will lie to you here
The ratio I use is 100g self-raising flour to 80g thick Greek yogurt per base. Five to four by weight. That’s it.
Volume measuring falls apart with this dough specifically, and it’s worth knowing why. A cup of flour can weigh anywhere from about 120g to 150g depending on whether you scooped it straight from the bag or spooned it in loosely — a swing of 25 percent. A cup of thick Greek yogurt is about 250g and doesn’t vary much at all, because you can’t aerate yogurt by scooping it. So the two errors don’t cancel out. They stack in the same direction, and “equal cups of each” can land you anywhere between a dry crumble and a batter.
With scales it comes out the same every time. Without them you’re going by feel, and the feel you want is a dough that pulls cleanly off the bowl and leaves your fingers only slightly tacky.
| Bases | Self-raising flour | Thick Greek yogurt | If using regular yogurt |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | 200g | 160g | 135g |
| 4 | 400g | 320g | 270g |
| 6 | 600g | 480g | 405g |
Each base at that weight rolls to roughly 22cm across at the thickness I’ll get to further down. Two per adult is a meal; one is a decent lunch with a salad.
Greek versus regular, and the water you can’t see
Greek yogurt has been strained, so a good chunk of its whey is gone. Regular set yogurt hasn’t. That’s the entire difference for this recipe, and it’s a bigger difference than it looks in the pot.
Strained Greek yogurt runs around 85 percent water; unstrained natural yogurt is more like 88. Three points sounds trivial until you scale it: across 320g that’s roughly 10g of extra water, and 10g into a 400g flour dough turns “just tacky” into “sticks to the pin and tears”. Hence the smaller quantity in the last column.
If you only have runny drinking-style yogurt, don’t try to fix it with extra flour — you’ll dilute the raising agent’s ratio and get a pale, flat base. Strain it through a sieve lined with kitchen paper for twenty minutes instead. That’s the same yogurt handling I use for Greek yogurt breakfast bowls, where a watery pot ruins the texture just as thoroughly.
Full fat or low fat? Full fat, easily. The low-fat version bakes a shade tougher and I can taste the difference side by side.
Ingredients
- 200g self-raising flour, plus a little for the worktop (makes 2 bases)
- 160g thick full-fat Greek yogurt
- ¼ tsp fine salt
- 1 fat garlic clove, grated to a paste
- 2 tbsp olive oil, for brushing
- 150g passata, uncooked, straight from the carton
- ½ tsp dried oregano
- A pinch of sugar, only if the passata tastes sharp
- 150g low-moisture mozzarella, grated, or a drained ball torn small
- 20g finely grated hard cheese
- Basil and chilli oil, at the table
Instructions
- Put a heavy dry frying pan on medium-high heat and turn the oven to its top temperature with a baking tray or steel already inside.
- Mix the flour and salt, add all the yogurt at once, and bring it together with a knife until it’s shaggy. Tip onto the worktop and knead for 60 to 90 seconds — long enough to smooth it, no longer.
- Divide into two, and roll each one to about 3mm thick and 22cm across. Flour lightly; this dough grips more than a yeasted one.
- Stir the grated garlic into the olive oil.
- Lay one base in the dry pan. Give it 60 to 90 seconds a side, until it puffs in patches and takes brown spots. It will look underdone. That’s correct.
- Brush the top with garlic oil, spread 75g passata thinly to within 1.5cm of the edge, season it, then scatter the cheese.
- Slide onto the hot tray in the oven for 5 to 6 minutes, until the cheese is bubbling and browning at the edges.
- Basil on after it comes out, never before. Repeat with the second base.
How thin, and how to tell
3mm. Roughly a pound coin on its edge.
Thicker than about 5mm and the middle stays doughy, because there’s no yeast structure holding an open crumb; it goes cakey, and you start tasting the raising agent. Thinner than 2mm and it tears when you move it.
The honest test is light. Hold the rolled base up against a window or a lamp; you should see the shadow of your fingers through it but not the shape of them clearly. That reads as vague until you’ve done it twice, and then it’s instant.
Hot dry pan first, hot tray second
You can put these straight into the oven and skip the pan. I did it that way for a while. The pan step is better, and here’s the mechanism.
A domestic oven, even at full whack, heats the base mostly from below through the tray while the air does the rest. That takes a couple of minutes, and for those couple of minutes the wet passata is sitting on raw dough, soaking in. You end up with a sealed grey layer under the sauce.
Ninety seconds in a dry pan on direct metal contact sets the outside of the dough before any sauce touches it. It’s a waterproof floor. The gas from the raising agent also expands fast against a set surface, which is what makes those patchy puffs, and those puffs are the closest this dough ever gets to the airy blisters on a classic margherita pizza.
Dry pan, not oiled. Oil fries the surface and you get something closer to a doughnut than a base.
The tray it lands on next should have been heating for twenty minutes. A cold tray pulls heat out of the base for the first ninety seconds, a quarter of the total bake, and you see it in a paler underside. A steel beats a stone, a stone beats a heavy upturned tray, and if you’re buying nothing the upturned tray is close enough. Same stored-heat logic as the preheated tin for a rustic rosemary focaccia.
Passata, straight from the carton
Don’t cook the sauce. There’s no point and it actively makes things worse at this thickness.
A simmered sauce has already lost water and concentrated, so it lands as a paste that then bakes a second time. What comes out is dark, jammy and flat. Uncooked passata with salt, oregano and a scrap of sugar goes on loose, thins into the surface, and cooks once. It stays red and tastes like tomato.
Use 75g per 22cm base and no more. Spread it with the back of a spoon in one thin coat you can nearly see through. If you’re used to the generous ladle on a pepperoni pizza, this will feel mean. It isn’t.
The load limit nobody warns you about
A 3mm base with no gluten network has almost no structural strength. It’s carrying the toppings on friction and dryness alone.
My working rule after a lot of soggy middles: about 225g of topping total on a 22cm base, sauce included. Past that, the moisture coming out of the toppings exceeds what the base can drive off in six minutes, and the centre sags when you lift a slice.
Wet things need pre-cooking or leaving off. Raw mushrooms, courgette and fresh tomato slices all release water straight downward. Salami, olives, red onion, capers and pre-roasted peppers are fine. Fresh mozzarella out of its brine is the usual offender: tear it and leave it on kitchen paper for ten minutes first.
Cheese that can melt in six minutes
Six minutes is not long, and the cheese has to be fully molten in that window or it sits on top as sad separate lumps.
Low-moisture mozzarella, grated rather than sliced, is the reliable one: melts fast, browns without splitting, and grating gets you even coverage from less cheese. 150g across two bases is plenty. Add 20g of a hard grated cheese for savouriness, since mozzarella brings texture but little flavour.
Cheddar works and I’m not going to pretend otherwise, though it releases more oil. Anything aged and crumbly won’t melt in time. A little goat’s cheese in dots is good, added at the start.
Set against a proper overnight dough
Here’s where I’ll be blunt, because the recipes that pretend there’s no gap are the ones that make people distrust the whole idea.
A yeasted dough left in the fridge overnight develops gluten. Long strands of protein link up while the dough sits, and that network is what traps gas into big irregular bubbles and what gives a cooked crust its chew — the slight resistance when you bite, the way a rim tears rather than snaps. Yogurt dough gets kneaded for 90 seconds and baked. There is no time for any of that. It has no chew. It snaps.
It also tastes of more, because fermentation makes flavour compounds that raising agents don’t. Side by side the gap is obvious to anyone, not just to people who care about bread.
So: if you have twenty-four hours, make the real thing. If your yeast dough came out dense last time, the causes are usually in why your bread didn’t rise rather than in the recipe you used.
What it does beat is the thing you’d actually reach for at 7pm with hungry people in the kitchen: a shop-bought base, or delivery. Fresher than both, cheaper, and the garlic oil under the sauce carries a lot — enough that I now brush the edges too and treat the rim as a strip of cheesy garlic bread to eat last.