Pizza Making at Pizza Express

Making pizza? Surely that’s easy? You get the base, you lather on the tomato sauce and then bung on the toppings. The oven is set to 200 degrees celsius. You put it in for 12-15 minutes and then boom, you’ve got yourself a pizza. However, it turns out that with enough perseverance and applied thought, you can really mess it up.

Standing over the preparation table at the launch of Pizza Express’s new menu, I came to realise that I was in the middle of producing a very shoddy pizza. Not only this but I also had the extra humiliation of knowing while I was producing a mishmash of a pizza, my companion’s was so good as to lead to the offer of a job at the restaurant.

Having been given all the instructions and shown how to carry them out by one of their top chefs, I was still left trying to rescue an ever-increasing mess of a dish. The dough refused to stretch in the way it had done so easily for everyone else and I was left grappling with an uncompliant base. I was partially saved by the fact that the new Pizza Express pizza is a Leggera, which has a hole cut out for the placement of salad. The dough that was excised and left over allowed me to do some vital repair work along the edges.

However, it was not enough to stop my companion from leaning over, sneering contemptuously and labelling what I had produced as `roadkill’.

The Leggera comes in two varieties. The Mare E Monti features king prawns, mushrooms, red onions and olives with light fior di latte mozzarella and garnished with a sprinkling of cajun spice, oregano and fresh parsley. For those who are vegetarian, there is the Verdure. This has a ring of red and yellow peppers, courgettes, mushrooms, rosemary and sweet baby onions along with light fior di latte mozzarella.

Fortunately, I was able to get a taste of ones that were made professionally and not by an idiot who spent a good ten minutes complaining that he had been given `the wrong sort of dough’. The pizzas certainly complement the menu you would expect to find at Pizza Express, with the emphasis on good quality toppings on a crisp base. The idea behind the Leggera is well-thought out and it is designed for those looking for a light lunch. However, if you are looking for something substantial, it might leave you a little short. Then again, you could always have two.

Pizza Express has several restaurants throughout London.

www.pizzaexpress.com