Chalk and cheese

I know it has been totally wrecked and bastardised by so many pizza delivery businesses, but the pure pizza is a truly great dish. While the name comes from the Greek word pitta, Naples is credited with the invention of the baked flatbread topped with cheese and a tomato sauce.

If you're in the mood for pizza there is a sliding scale of how desperate you are, which is the inverse of the quality of the result. If you can't wait and have a pizza delivery near you, a quick phone call and 20-30 minutes will get you a meat lovers with cheese in the crust that will fill you up, but is a mere caricature of what pizza can be.

At the other end of the pizza desirability scale is one where you have sourced the finest DOP San Marzano tomatoes to make the sauce, and grown most of the toppings: eggplant, zucchini, tomatoes, basil, oregano and arugula. You raised the pig, cured and aged the prosciutto. You've hand-kneaded the dough using high-protein flour and proved it very slowly to get the resulting thin crust. For the cheese, I know I'm getting fanciful here, you have milked your water buffalos, cultured, cooked and hand-stretched the cheese into the finest mozzarella. You've learned how to speak Italian, flown to Naples and learned how to make a wood-fired oven. You've stockpiled hardwoods from oak, apple and maple. You are ready now to make a pizza.

Clearly, this is going way too far and likely to see you sad and single.

I got a book for Christmas that has questioned my commitment to the weekly pizza. We are out of any delivery zone here so I have always made my own bases and I was pretty happy until I opened the neatly wrapped present (one that I bought for myself and wrapped).

goPizza, by Alba Pezone, draws on recipes from five of Naples' finest pizza chefs, including Enzo Coccia, Ciro Coccia and Enzo Piccirillo and is an awesome insight to pizza and how simple but amazing they can be if you go to just a little trouble. It's certainly got me thinking about a wood-fired oven on site. They look like a lot of work to build and prepare, but I reckon I'll do it just for more authentica pizza.

The book gives you a very simple pizza dough. Use good flour - Italian Tipo 00 pizza flour is suggested, essentially a fine high-protein flour. I haven't found one yet with the required 12 per cent protein so just use my usual organic unbleached bread flour. The hydration is fairly low, 55 per cent, which makes a dough that is really easy to handle (a sourdough will have up to 75 per cent hydration, which means 750 grams of water for every kilogram of flour).

The trick, as always, is time. The longer you can ferment the dough the better the gluten development and the thinner you'll get the base. Depending on the temperature, you might need just a quarter of a teaspoon of dried yeast for each kilogram of dough. Use good salt flakes, such as Murray River pink salt, at 10 grams a kilogram of dough.

The kneading technique is harder to describe. By hand, you spend 30-40 minutes messing around with it, but I just chuck it into the Kitchenaid mixer with a dough hook and it does a pretty good job in 15.

Once it feels really elastic - so you can stretch a piece out and see through it - divide it into 230-250 gram chunks and form each into a tight ball. Place in a cool place, cover with cling film and let the dough balls prove slowly. If they're looking ready early put them in the fridge until needed.

Making bread dough is always restorative; all the worries of the world seem less so with flour on your hands.

For the tomato sauce, such an important part of the Napolitan pizzas, the book suggests you use only DOP-certified San Marzano tomatoes. Put them through a food mill, then cook them down to a thickish but not pasty sauce. Season with salt. Add herbs if you want, but herbs can go directly on the hot pizza.

The cheese would have to be as important as anything here and a good, pale mozzarella is the starting point. You can get buffalo mozzarella; it's expensive, but closer to what you'd have in Naples. The yellowed, hard cheese sold here is nothing like it, so find the best you can find or make it yourself.

Mozzarella making requires a lot more attention than quick fresh cheeses. You need good temperature control, the right bacteria and rennet, a pH measuring device and hands that can take the heat as you stretch the curds. This is the stage I am at. The pizzas bases are pretty good, the sauce excellent, but I feel the need to make the cheese. I'm using cow's milk, but if anyone has a water buffalo in the backyard let me know.

If you don't have a wood-fired oven which will cook pizza in a minute or two, cook the thinly stretched base with tomato sauce first for eight to 10 minutes at 250 degrees (or as hot as your oven goes), then add the cheese and toppings and cook for another five minutes, adding fresh herbs and/or rocket once it's cooked, plus a drizzle of good olive oil and a grind of pepper.

Zucchini, mozzarella and pancetta pizza

1 prepared pizza base

2-3 tbsp tomato sauce

3 smallish zucchinis, diced (about a loose cup)

splash of olive oil

dried oregano

4 zucchini flowers, cleaned and torn

good quality pale mozzarella or fior di latte, sliced thin

3-4 very thin slices pancetta

Cook the zucchini in oil with a pinch of oregano until very soft. Use a fork to smash half of them to a paste. Cook the base with the tomato sauce, scatter with zucchini, cheese and flowers and layer the pancetta on top. Bake for five more minutes until the base is very crisp, drizzle with olive oil and serve.

Bocconcini, prosciutto, figs and rocket pizza

1 prepared pizza base

2-3 tbsp tomato sauce

10-12 small balls of bocconcini mozzarella, broken in half

4-5 very thin slices prosciutto (best you can find), torn

3 plump, ripe figs, in 0.5 cm slices

handful of rinsed and dried rocket

Cook the base with the tomato sauce, add the cheese, prosciutto and figs and cook for five more minutes.

Add the rocket to the hot pizza and drizzle with oil to serve.

Buffalo mozzarella, cherry tomatoes and basil pizza

1 prepared pizza base

handful really ripe cherry tomatoes (or use drained tinned cherry tomatoes)

salt

1 large ball buffalo mozzarella, broken into pieces (available from good delis)

basil leaves, torn

If using fresh tomatoes, halve them, sprinkle with salt and grill in the oven until they start to sear.

Roll out the pizza base and squeeze the tomatoes on top so they look exploded.

Cook the base for 10 minutes, add the mozzarella and cook another five minutes.

Add the basil to serve.

>>Bryan Martin is winemaker at Ravensworth and Clonakilla, www.bryanmartin.com.au