Neapolitan pizza in a pan: no fancy gadgets needed

We are lucky to live in an age of domestic culinary convenience: whatever your heart desires, there’s an appliance, gizmo or specific spoon for it. Want to make cakes in the shape of a shoe? Not a problem. Need twenty different ways to crush garlic? Your needs can be met. Looking for a boiled egg, but in the shape of a square? Or a teddy bear, or a duck? Easy, you can make all three.

So it seems remarkable that when it comes to effective gadgets or assistance for something as popular as pizza, we’re high and dry. It seems virtually impossible to get your hands on something that will help you replicate the thin, crisp crusted Italian-style pizza at home for anything other than seriously big money.

Luckily, there is an answer, and you probably have the items that you need in your kitchen already.

Getting that traditional Neapolitan-style pizza with its charred edges and crisp base is all about heat. And that’s the problem: proper pizza ovens are designed to be hotter than the depths of hell, and a pizza slides in and out in a matter of moments. So how do you ape that hot hot hot pizza oven, in your own domestic setting? Well, while our ovens might not be great at producing that level of heat from all sides, you can get pretty close by using two different sources of direct heat: the hob, and the grill.

Using a heavy-bottomed skillet pan, which can sit on the hob and move to the oven (ie. make sure it doesn’t have plastic handles, or any component which could melt or warp), you can stretch the dough directly onto the base of the pan, and then cook it very quickly at a high temperature. Once the base of the pizza is darkening on the bottom – you can gently lift the dough with a spatula to check – spread with tomato sauce, cheese and your toppings of choice, before transferring to a hot grill for five minutes.