The craftsman behind the Carapina shops in Florence and Rome showcased stracciatella (“torn apart”) gelato, only it was stracciatella of another kind. This one was not a chocolate chip ice cream but rather one made with stracciatella di buffalo cheese –  a soft, ultra-creamy mozzarella variant made from the milk of water buffalo.

After his presentation I had the opportunity to meet Bonini and pose a few questions about using the best techniques and ingredients and avoiding the bad ones. What, I asked Bonini, was the biggest obstacle to high-quality gelato in Italy?

The very first pizza of PizzaTuesday Naples, the young&foodish group tour of the world’s pizza capital, was shaped by the hands of Luigi Condurro at the legendary L’Antica Pizzeria da Michele.

The master pizzaiolo lightly pinched the corners of the uncooked pizza and stretched it over the pizza peel, using the edges of that long-handled wood paddle to hold the flattened dough’s drawn-out shape.

Luigi the virtuoso voiced his love for pizza with his fingertips, even when addressing the question asked and answered in the short video above.

Luigi is the son of Michele Condurro, who gave the pizzeria its name, and the grandson of Salvatore Condurro Sr, who founded the family Neapolitan pizza business in 1870. The Condurros moved Da Michele to its current location on Via Cesare Sersale in 1930.

The crowds at Da Michele are as much a fixture outside as Luigi is inside. The pizzeria turns tables as quickly as its pizzaioli turn pizzas, assembling each Margherita or Marinara, the only varieties available, in one minute and cooking it in another. Though the wait is rarely longer than an hour it can be an excruciating 60 minutes given how good the pizza is.

PizzaTuesday Naples will return in late October for intimate meet-and-eats with Luigi as well as a new generation of Neapolitan pizza greats like Franco Pepe, Enzo Coccio and Ciro Salvo. If your want to try the third-best, second-best and first-best pizzas of your life in 24 hours you’ll want to join us.

Click here to submit a request for more information.

I assumed the white pizza box Elliot handed me contained a pizza, albeit a rather heavy one. But when I opened the lid I saw a chemistry set where the pizza ought to have been. Plastic containers containing various elements were slotted into the round openings in a square sheet of green cardboard.

I slid the box over to Elliot for an explanation of its contents. The printed text under the lid contained the step-by-step instructions (see their recipe) for the Pizza Pilgrims Neapolitan Frying Pan Pizza . I was to “bake” this at home with a nonstick frying pan, a hob (USA stove) and a grill (USA broiler).

The containers held all the ingredients I would need for two 20-25cm (roughly 9-inch) Margherita pizzas: two doughs, tomato sauce, fresh basil, Parmesan,  mozzarella, olive oil.

The next night I took down the nonstick frying pan and pizza paddle (peel) hanging from the kitchen wall of my London flat, preheated the grill, opened the beta version of this home pizza kit and got to work.

[slider_pro id=”55″]
 

The directions were clear, the ingredients superb and the procedure straightforward. It helped that I was accustomed to stretching out my own homemade pizza dough. In addition, if I didn’t have a pizza paddle to dust with flour and neatly transfer the flattened disks of dough from counter work surface to frying pan I’d likely have botched the manoeuvre.

Both my Pizza Pilgrims Frying Pan Pizzas were good. Very good. Truly amazing. Okay, the bottom of the crusts were much crisper than the soft, pliable ones I’ve sampled at Pizza Pilgrims and other Neapolitan-styled pizzerias (not that I minded) but that might have been my (un)doing. I fear I cooked the pizzas for too long over too low a flame.

Oddly, in a couple of ways my two Pizza Pilgrims Frying Pan Margheritas were even superior to the Margheritas I’d tasted direct from Pizza Pilgrims pizza oven the prior night. As widely acclaimed a pizzeria as Pizza Pilgrims is its pizzaioli do not always manage to connect the white dots of fior di latte (cow’s milk mozzarella) scattered over the surface. They either don’t get or don’t stay melty enough. Also, the pizzas are not always piping hot.

On pizza I prefer mozzarella in a molten state that runs into the tomato sauce. The two commingle and the red and white surface of the Margherita goes pink. With Pizza Pilgrims home version the only thing stopping the steaming-hot fior di latte from flowing off the top of pizza and into the living room was the crust’s puffed rim.
 

Two of my favourite things in the world, together in one neat little bundle (an order of three is £4). And who says dreams don’t really come true?

Meter is a pop-up pizza bar so naturally there is a pizza, too: Neapolitan-style pizza (read: thin and soft in the middle, puffy rim) stretched out by Naples pizzaiolo Valentino and portioned and priced (from £7-£12) by the quarter-metre. Val’s Margherita benefits from quality tomatoes, plenty of fresh (uncooked) basil and supremely melty fior di latte (cow’s milk mozzarella); the Melanzane, from the addition of sweet aubergines, Parmesan and delightful dabs of ricotta. Nice! [slider_pro id=”3″]

Charred in a pizza oven fired with gas and not wood, the cornicione (rim) needs more air pockets offering greater compression to the chew. It’s a tad too doughy. This is nevertheless real good pizza that makes Meter matter for City-to-Shoreditch stopovers and Clerkenwell-to-Hoxton layovers. The comfy lounge bar space was known as The Camp. Many still call it that. Years from now, long after The Camp name is forgotten and the Meter has sadly popped down there will be a blue plaque on the building’s facade:

70-74 City Road, London EC1Y 2BJ (map), @MeterLDN

Notes Music & Coffee is home to the UK’s first La Marzocco Strada, the Maserati of espresso machines. Sartori bakes its Neapolitan-styled pizzas in the wood-fired brick forno crafted by Strazzullo Michele, the Stradivarius of pizza ovens.

With its Strada platform La Marzocco introduces pressure profiling, a technology which allows the barista to customise espresso extraction to draw out certain flavour components and mute others. Ordinarily a barista would pull an espresso under a steady brew pressure of 9 bars for 25-30 seconds. With the Strada baristas can adjust the pressure as easily as a chef would the intensity of a burner.

Initially I dismissed pressure profiling as a gimmick and the Strada’s mechanical pressure paddle as nothing more than a play toy for baristas. (Sure I too wanted one in my bedroom, but that’s another story.) Notes Music & Coffee co-owner Fabio Ferreira changed my thinking in 60 seconds. He pulled two espressos for me using the same coffee blend – Has Bean’s Kicker – but changed their pressure profiles. He brewed the first shot under a pressure of 9 bars for the first 15 seconds and then lowered the pressure to 3 bars for the final 15 seconds. He brewed the second shot at 3 bars for the first 15 seconds, ramped up the pressure to 9 bars for an additional 10 seconds and then back down to 5 bars for the final 5 seconds.

The difference between the two was dramatic: The first shot delivered the lemon zing that puts the kick in Kicker. The second was sweeter and softer, likely the result, according to Ferreira, of the long, low-pressure “pre-infusion”. If any geek needed a rationale to spring for a gleaming new Strada, this was it.

The appeal of a Strazzullo Michele pizza oven, like that of a La Marzocco, can be as much about machismo as macchina. That the company’s made-to-order pizza ovens are now mostly exported to deep-pocketed clients in Japan, Korea, China and the USA only enhances their snob appeal back home in Naples. Thrilled merely to have Strazzullo Michele take its money, Sartori did not dictate such design details as the shape of oven’s benchtop or the colours and patterns of its decorative mosaic. Strazzullo Michele pretty much told Sartori how their Leicester Square oven was going to be.

The shiny, bright-coloured ceramic shell you see encasing the domes of brick ovens at famous pizzerias is missing. So, for that matter, is the dome – or at least the top of it. The low height and flattened roof of this model’s baking chamber enables even heat distribution and cooking. There’s little risk of incinerating the crust even before the mozzarella has melted and the dough has cooked through. Paolo, Sartori’s accomplished Neapolitan pizzaiolo, can liquify the fior di latte that floats over his exceptionally light Margherita without having to lift it up from the hot stone and suspend the pizza in the oven’s hottest reaches. The hot zones are everywhere.

Impressive as they are, the Strazzullo Michele pizza oven and La Marzocco Strada espresso machine depend on top-quality ingredients as well as the skill of the mano del operatore. At Notes Music & Coffee and Sartori the “operator’s hand” belongs to geeks who know enough to know there is always more to know.

Notes Music & Coffee, 31 St Martin’s Lane, London WC2N 4ER (map) – 020 7240 0424

Sartori, 15-18 Great Newport Street, London WC2H 7JE (map) – 020 7836 6308

The next gathering of the #PizzaTuesday papparazzi is on the 23rd of March 7:30pm at Santoré – 59 Exmouth Market, London. Camera phones welcome. Book now.

In an LA Times article about Ferran Adrià’s plans to open a pizzeria in Barcelona, the elBulli chef is shown sampling a pizza margherita at Turin ‘s Frattelli La Cozza [corso Regio Parco 39, tel: +39 011859900 map.] That pizzeria may take its name from brothers Carlo and Guilio Fratelli, but its claim to fame is Aldo Brandi, the sole living pizzaiolo directly descended from Raffaele Esposito Brandi. According to legend, Raffaele created the tricolored pizza – basil green, mozzarella white, tomato red – to honor Margherita, first queen of the united Italy. The Buster Keaton-like photo is of Aldo Brandi, though I’m not sure if he’s in the frame, holding the frame or both.