…or taking the great pizza experiment to a whole new level!

While I was working last weekend, I had the telly on in the background and Sunday Brunch was on. For those outside the UK it’s a magazine style programme that is heavily orientated around cookery. To be honest, it’s lost some of its appeal to me of late. It changed from the BBC (public service channel) to Channel 4 (commercial channel) recently and some of its new features strike me as a bit cack.

Anyway, a couple of blokes cooking pizza on it caught my eye. Their background has been deleted from view as far as I can tell. They’ve burst onto the foodie scene in London due to their pizza pilgrims book, street van and now, I believe, restaurant. All I can see about their background is that before they did this they had “desk jobs” and as that’s all they’ll say it gives me poetic licence to invent a past for them – I reckon either bankers who got massive payouts just before the banking industry went belly up or advertising agency types. So sue me! They spent six months in Italy learning to cook and have come back to the UK to show us all how it’s done.

You can see that I didn’t really take to them as humans but that’s by the by. They did, though, inspire me with their evangelism about pizza, as you'll know, a shared obsession, and they recommended cooking pizza in a radically different manner to my now well-honed version that I’ve “perfected” over the last six or seven years. They say that a Neapolitan style pizza without a wood fired oven is best done in a frying pan – you get the pan scorching hot, bung in the dough, put on the toppings and then after a couple of minutes shove the whole lot under a smoking hot grill for another couple of minutes.

Their insistence on the best ingredients and taking good time intrigued me because I’ve long been a fan of slow cooking and although the pizzas took a mere 4 minutes to cook, the dough was done using a slow-rise technique and they waxed lyrical about the improvement in flavour because of it.

So, I downloaded their recipe from Channel 4’s website, made the dough yesterday evening and we time-shifted pizzas to tonight from their usual Friday night slot. I didn’t slavishly follow their recipe, partly because we don’t eat meat and partly because I have my own red sauce recipe that I cook in batches and freeze for use on pizzas. What I did take on board, aside from the dough recipe, was double the amount of red sauce and half the amount of mozzarella I’d usually use.

My dough handling skills were a bit cack – I normally roll out the dough and I was a bit intimidated by the speed of the pizza making, as well as the intense heat from the low level grill burning my thighs as I was doing the bit on the hob – but the outcome was bloody excellent even though I say so myself. When you put pizzas in the oven, unless you only “show” the pizza the red sauce you get a watery layer on the dough – hence my using only a dessert spoon of sauce on an oven-baked pizza. Because of the use of the grill, the watery layer doesn’t happen and you get sauce but it’s not watery.

It’s funny how something catches your eye and you just instinctively know it’ll work. That’s what happened last Sunday morning and now I know I was right to trust my instinct. The Pizza Pilgrims are right – this is the ultimate way to make pizza if you don’t have a wood fired oven! Superb.