PIZZA AL FRESCO in a wood-burning oven

You have not eaten Pizza until you have cooked it yourself, with your admiring friends looking on, in a traditional wood-fired brick oven! You can forget the barbecue as the great outdoor cook-fest; making and baking your own pizza offers all the great fascinations of childhood, - dough-making, fire-lighting, and eating with your fingers - with the illusion of becoming a great cook.

The two main ingredients for successful pizza-making are THE OVEN, and the DOUGH. Add in friends, old Tuscan stone walls, some varied ‘toppings’, and an oven-master-baker, and your pizza-party will be a hugely good fun affair.

The Oven

Here is one of London's top restaurateurs Gennaro Contaldo, looking extemely happy as the flames of Vallicorte's wood-burning traditional bread oven build up the temperature to well over 400 degrees. He built the fire inside the domed refractory brick oven and every hour or so, during the morning before the party, he raked the bright embers across the floor of the oven and piled fresh wood onto the ‘cavalletto’ which is the iron frame set to one side of the space.

The door of the oven is a steel plate that just stands across the opening. Depending how much space is left for air to enter and the flames and fumes to get out, the temperature can be controlled with experience to a surprising accuracy. Tradition has it that a sprig of evergreen tree, usually box, should shrivel and burn but not spontaneously flare when thrown onto the oven floor – then the temperature is right for cooking a pizza. Immediately before the first pizza is to be cooked, the oven-master will sweep the floor with his ‘scopa’ – a roughly made twig-broom. Then he will sprinkle a thin wooden paddle with a pinch of semolina flour and slide it under the ready-prepared pizza pastry complete with its toppings and ready for cooking.

Meanwhile, on a side table, the dough is ready, and sitting in a basket in nice smooth round balls, lightly floured, and already ‘relaxed’. Enthusiastic friends take turns to roll a ball flat and thin on a smooth wooden table, and then put on the ‘toppings’. Not too much tomato – it must not overflow the edges or it will spoil the clean surface of the oven floor – some cheese, and then a selection of the prepared toppings according to taste, are sprinkled, dropped or spread. It is ready. The oven-master slides his paddle under the uncooked pizza, swings round to the open oven (the heat radiating from it like a hot blast) and with a deft flick shoots the pizza into a corner of the rosy interior.

We watch; the pastry rises, bubbles a little, and settles; the cheese melts and flows, and the various toppings settle into the all-over browning surface. About a minute passes, then ‘hey-ho’ cries the oven-master and he slides the paddle under the now fairly rigid pizza and pulls it out with a cheer from the onlookers. It is placed on a wooden chopping board, immediately sliced into wedges, and everybody gets a piece. It is crisp and fragrant, tasty like no other, and a new gastronomic experience.

Now this oven-master is an expert. While the first pizza is cooking two more have been picked up and placed into the oven, and each is deftly turned to avoid scorching. The procession of pizzas goes on until everyone has made at least one and no more can possibly be eaten.

Basic and essential for every pizza are tomato puree, mozzarella cheese, coarse ground black pepper, seasoning, and herbs (rosemary, basil, chervil, oregano) Olives, etc etc. You can add anything else you fancy - favourites are anchovies of course, spicy sausage sliced thin, raisins, chopped ham; there is no end to the inventive possibilities.

The oven: In Italy it is common to find an outside bread-oven attached to a country house. However, the components of a good pizza oven can be bought ready packaged and shipped anywhere in the world for under £500. They require assembly, and a simple surrounding construction will be needed with a short chimney flue; it is a wonderful addition to a pool-house or a patio, ready for a really different summer evening party.