Quattro Formaggi Pizza – A Couple Cooks

This Quattro Formaggi pizza is irresistible! It’s topped with a tangy red sauce and the classic Italian combination of four cheeses.

Here’s a pie that’s one of the Italian greats: Quattro Formaggi! This classic Italian combination of four cheese is popular for a reason: combine each flavor and texture and it makes one completely irresistible slice! There’s the melty mozzarella, sharp and salty Parmesan and Pecorino cheese, and the subtle funk of gorgonzola. Combine it all on pillowy pizza crust with zingy pizza sauce and it’s a match made in pizza heaven.

What is quattro formaggi?

Quattro formaggi means four cheese in Italian, and refers to a popular style of pizza featuring a combination of four cheeses, with or without red sauce. The types of cheeses vary based on the pizzeria, but the most common combination is mozzarella, gorgonzola, Parmesan and fontina cheese. Other variations include swapping out the Parmesan and fontina with pecorino romano, asiago, ricotta, taleggio, robiola, or other Italian cheeses.

For this spin on quattro formaggi pizza, we used Pecorino Romano in place of the fontina cheese to bring a salty intensity to this pie. Here are the ingredients you’ll need for this pie:

Pizza dough options

How to make a Quattro Formaggi pizza that tastes like you’re in Italy? Make homemade pizza dough! We’ve honed our dough recipes to perfection over a decade of recipe testing. Each one of the recipes below works perfectly in a standard oven or pizza oven to make next-level artisan pizza:

• Best Pizza Dough: The standard! This is our best oven pizza dough and works best on a pizza stone.
• Thin Crust Pizza Dough: This variation is easy and you can roll it out instead of stretching it.
• Pizza Oven Dough: Got a pizza oven? This is the dough recipe for you.
• Best-Ever Sheet Pan Pizza: This simple recipe makes the equivalent of two pizzas in a sheet pan: and you don’t need any special tools!

The best sauce for quattro formaggi (or go without)

Quattro formaggi pizza can be served with a red tomato-based pizza sauce or without sauce, called Pizza Bianca (white pizza). They both taste great, but we like bit of red sauce to really make this pie shine. Here are a few notes:

• For a red pizza, spread a bit of tomato sauce for a bold, saucy pie. Try this best homemade pizza sauce recipe, which you can whip up in just 5 minutes, no cooking required.
• For a white pizza, make sure to brush the dough with olive oil before layering it with cheese. It’s a little more cheese forward and dryer. To add a little more moisture, you could consider spreading a ricotta as a base like in this Pizza Bianca.

If you’re making our best pizza dough or thin crust pizza, you’ll need a pizza stone and peel for this recipe. If you’re using a pizza oven, it typically comes with its own pizza peel that can withstand the high temperatures. If you don’t have these tools, consider making the sheet pan pizza dough or a pan pizza! Here are some notes on these tools:

• Pizza stone: Baking on a pizza stones makes the crust crisp on the outside and chewy on the inside. Here’s the pizza stone we recommend.
• Pizza peel: This paddle slides the pie onto the hot stone in the oven. We recommend this standard pizza peel or this conveyor pizza peel, which makes transferring to the oven a breeze.
• Pizza oven (optional): An outdoor pizza oven makes next level pizza! We have experience with both the Ooni pizza oven and the ROCCBOX (the ROCCBOX is our preference). We used a pizza oven to get the charred crust you see in the photos.

Let us know if you try this Quattro formaggi pizza and what you think in the comments below!

More pizza recipes

There are infinite ways to top a pizza! Here are a few of our favorite pizza recipes: