PizzaExpress From Italy With Love: 100 Favourite Recipes to Make at Home

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It all blends very well together and is an absolute pleasure to read and eyeball all the images and recipe ideas. Pros

Sometimes the instructions can be a bit thin, which tilts it towards a book for serious pizza makers and restaurateurs. It has chapters on the history, all the different styles, the ingredients, methods, and equipment, all before going into the dough recipes and the actual pizza topping recipes themselves.It’s based around 3 doughs – puffy Naples style, thin and crunchy Romana, and pan pizza Al Taglio. Marc focuses on Italian recipes but with an American influence. Rather than listing every pizza style known, it focuses on the important bits of dough – the flour, fermentation, different ovens, and tools. It’s got a lot of content in it, which comes from the two brother’s journey of setting up a number of pizza restaurants in London after touring around Italy. There are the usual sections on flour, tomatoes, cheese, and equipment that you find in other pizza books.

It covers buying the right ingredients and equipment, some short theory, mixing and shaping dough balls, and finally the stretching, topping, and baking of the pizza. He has taken his methodical approach to bread dough to research the best dough in pizza making. Sometimes almost scientific-like, but very easily digestible for the reader.A bit opinionated and focused on Neapolitan-style pizza. They dismiss the idea of using a pizza stone or steel to cook pizza which I don’t agree with at all! The second half of the book is just as fulfilling. It has 11 pizza dough recipes for different styles and hydrations. A great thing about this book is that Marc offers different recipes and instructions for cooking in different ovens. At 12 stamps, loyal customers become a VIP gold member meaning every time they visit PizzaExpress for an entire year, they are automatically entitled to free Dough Balls, a free soft drink, a free large water, a free hot drink and a free Romana upgrade - as well as other seasonal offers. Gold members' kids also eat free from Monday to Thursday. On the downside, I would say the book is a little on the advanced side for beginners. All the doughs use a wild yeast starter, similar to sourdough, which is an extra hurdle to grow and manage if you are starting out.