The Asparagus Pizza Fiends

Pizza must be the most everyday of all foods. Far too often my working lunch is a lacklustre slice of takeaway pizza eaten at the computer. Yet small changes to exactly the same ingredients give results that taste very different. Here are two departures from the basic formula, both fit to be served even to guests.

The first favourite stands for the pan pizzas on which I imprinted early. The first restaurant bills of my very own, after all, I ran up at Pizza Hut, in the era when the Super Supreme had just landed in Finland (mullets and acid-washed pale denim were also terribly in at the time). In the States, at least, Pizza Hut's days of glory are far behind it. The outlets look like places where one catches TB or external parasites. On top of the Supreme there are strange pellets that might have come from a pet shop.

Pizza Hut was overtaken long ago by any number of competitors, such as Pizzeria Uno of Chicago, which turned deep dish pizza into a chain concept. The whole thick pizza is said to have been invented at Uno in the first place, during the war. Here is a home-made, thick-as-thick pizza that does not differ from its model, at least not for the worse. Maize flour goes into the dough, and the kneading is ten minutes of muscle work unless you own a Kitchen Aid. The layers go in back to front, with the cheese laid on the base like cobblestones and the tomatoes only on top of it. That way, I am told, the cheese has no time to burn although the pizza spends a good half hour in the oven.

When I finally made it to Italy, yet another dimension opened up in my pizza universe. My local male friends would usually have a pizza a head for a late supper and half a margherita for pudding. I began to grasp the beauty of simplicity. The other revelation was that a pizza need not consist of tinned pineapple, and that a crisp flat disc straight from the heat of a stone oven can be given fresh toppings there is no reason to cook: fridge-cold ricotta, prosciutto crudo, cold-smoked rainbow trout, or bresaola and rocket.

The best pizza I have ever eaten probably came from a garishly lit pizzeria in the middle of the foggy emptiness of the Po plain, somewhere between Bologna and Ferrara. There the pizza was stretched as thin as thin ("super tirata", "tiratissima"), and on top were fresh porcini, if not actual truffles.

A gas or electric oven at home will not, of course, match a wood-fired one, but on a propitious day - such as today - the recipe below turns out a perfectly decent home version of the basic Italian pizza. Fancy toppings finish it off into something fit for the drawing room. One pizza gets tomato and green asparagus. The other is baked with nothing but cheese, and the rocket and the cold-smoked reindeer go on only after the oven. Reindeer does the job of bresaola. Once rolled out, the base is not left to rise again, unless a thick bun of a crust is what you want. The dough makes two pizzas, enough food for two people (and perhaps a few leftovers).