With the launch of Chef’s Table: Pizza on Netflix, the focus is on Italy's most famous culinary export and the chefs who dedicate their lives to it. By far, the world’s favourite takeout food is pizza. Its popularity knows no bounds, and as this traditional Italian street food becomes more beloved, its recipes become more refined. From its birthplace in Naples, to Chicago, Tokyo, and beyond, pizza chefs pay attention to the quality of flour, water and yeast to make the perfect pizza dough, and then top it with the very best local ingredients.
Once the wood-fire pizza oven was the only way to cook a perfect pizza with the right crust. But recently the home kitchen pizza oven has been reinvented, and can deliver pizza restaurant-quality results. Other alternatives include a pizza stone that heats to the right temperature – between 450 and 500 degrees F. If neither of those is available, it is possible to make good pizza in a cast iron skillet in a regular oven at maximum temperature with the fan on. Here is a round-up of some tried and tested pizza recipes, from the classical to the gastronomic.