Rachel Allen

People have been eating and enjoying pizza since the days of Ancient Greece, says Rachel Allen, who is also an ardent fan of the world’s favourite food which, luckily, is easy to make

Easy home-made pizza

The idea of putting toppings on flatbread isn’t a recent one. The Ancient Greeks were adding herbs, onions and oil to flatbreads thousands of years ago, which makes sense, as it’s thought that ‘pizza’ is a derivative of the word ‘pitta’. About 200 years ago, in Naples, they started adding tomatoes to their bread. Then along came Queen Margherita’s visit to the city in 1889, and the mozzarella, tomato and basil-topped pizza Margherita, with the colours of the Italian flag, was born. It was then exported, via America, to each and every corner of the world.

What is it about pizza that makes it so totally irresistible? Is it the crisp, chewy crust that’s slightly charred around the edges, the sweet tomato sauce, or the creamy, salty, melted cheese? Or is it the fact that you can top it with everything from pulled pork to purple sprouting broccoli and eat it with your hands?

While pizza is easy to make, there are a few important points to remember to get it right. The dough should be light and airy, the tomatoes should be properly ripe and bright red, and the cheese needs to be meltingly tender — these are the three elements of a basic pizza. Pizza purists will say that for the perfect pizza, it must be baked on the floor of a wood-burning oven at 485°C, but for those of us who don’t have a wood-burning oven as part of our kitchen kit, they can be baked in a domestic oven on a hot pizza stone, or, failing that, a hot upturned baking tray, as outlined in the pizza recipe, right. It’s a recipe for one of my favourites, a simple pizza with chorizo, roasted red onions and rosemary. Yum. No wonder pizza is the world’s favourite food.

“What makes pizza so irresistible? The crisp crust, the sweet tomato sauce or melted cheese?”