With my own hands! So exciting. It was the first of May on Wednesday and therefore a bank holiday and I had the most fantastic day… I took May the mutt to the football pitch to watch Roby play (he scored!), then we went to the beach, had an aperitif and our first dip of the year, then to our friends’ house near Paestum for a pizza making party not dissimilar to the one I mentioned last year. Except for the fact that there was too much dough so even us noobs got a chance to try making a pizza – yay!

To be fair the dough “panetti” were already made and I won’t pretend I know how to do that (although it is apparently pretty easy) but I did mould the pizza dough into a circle (harder than it looks, the dough is super squidgy, soft and stretchy), put on the toppings, picked it up and placed it in the oven – all harder than it looks again.

We made a ridiculous number of pizzas all in all (the one I made was provola cheese, courgettes and speck) and ended up taking many of them home… Hell, even our friends’ kids were making pizza!

I will make a full post on pizza making at a later date, but for now at this late stage of the evening I will leave you with one of the most important facts: when you make pizza in a wood fired oven (hint: ALWAYS) you know that the oven is hot enough all the way through when the inside of the oven turns uniformly white. Then it is ready and you can start popping in the pizzas, although you have to be certain to keep the wood topped up and movng around the oven to keep that nice even heat going. Also, pizza cooks fast – don’t let it burn!!!