How to enjoy authentic Neapolitan pizza without leaving the UK

The science behind authentic Neapolitan pizza

There are rules on what constitutes an authentic Neapolitan pizza and one of these is that it is baked in an oven at temperatures between 430 and 480 degrees Celsius. At that heat, a pizza cooks in roughly 60 to 90 seconds. The outcome you get is a base where the outside chars and blisters while the inside stays soft, almost pillowy and you can fold it in half without it cracking. Home ovens just don't get hot enough, so you're looking at up to 12 minutes in there instead of 90 seconds. It is still genuinely tasty (I've got loads of fakeaway recipes that prove it) but it's a different dish at that point, not just a slower version of the same one. The dough tells the same story. Real Neapolitan dough has just four ingredients: Caputo 00 flour, water, salt and yeast with no added extras. You also need to let your yeast undergo a slow fermentation, sometimes 24 hours or more.

How to tell authentic Neapolitan pizza apart

Neapolitan pizza is actually the only pizza style that holds a formal EU Traditional Specialty Guaranteed designation, which was granted in 2010, and tells you how seriously the tradition is taken today. Some restaurants claim to produce authentic Neapolitan pizzas but the base is often a dead giveaway. It should have a thin centre with an unevenly blistered and charred rim which comes from the intense heat. Find the crust rigid or uniformly golden? Well, then the oven just wasn't hot enough and it's not the real thing. Ingredients are just as important and should include San Marzano tomatoes which have a sweetness and a low acidity that tinned supermarket tomatoes just can't match. Fior di Latte mozzarella, as it melts differently and tastes milkier than the block cheese most of us grate over our fakeaway homemade bases. Swap one thing and you might not notice. But swap three or four and the whole character of the pizza changes. You'll take the difference, trust me.

Finding Naples in Manchester

Pizza Pilgrims isn’t the only pizza restaurant we love in Manchester. There are now more than 100 places to explore for anyone on their own pilgrimage to find the best pizza in Manchester. But when Pizza Pilgrims opened its first Manchester branch on Deansgate, we were excited to check it out, especially knowing it was a homecoming for its founders, brothers James and Thom Elliot. Both brothers were born and raised in the city and started the brand after a 2011 road trip through southern Italy in a three-wheeled Piaggio Ape, where they picked up the secrets of Neapolitan pizza-making: double-fermented dough, DOP San Marzano tomatoes, Fior di Latte mozzarella from Campania, all blasted at scorchingly high temperatures. Beyond the classic Margherita, dishes like the Salsiccia e Friarielli (Italian sausage, wild broccoli, smoked mozzarella and chilli) lean into proper regional Italian flavour, with vegan and gluten-free pizza bases available as well.

Homemade or restaurant...why choose?

A Friday night with the family, flour everywhere and everyone arguing over who gets the last piece of pepperoni is memorable in its own way and one of my favourite things to do. But for a special occasion, or one of those nights where someone else doing the cooking feels like the real treat, an authentic pizza with its traditional pedigree and ingredients flown in from southern Italy offers something altogether different. The joy isn’t in deciding which is better, but in knowing when each one is exactly what you’re craving.