The Pizza Makers - Pizza Gets Sophisticated

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What is the best thing to eat while watching 4 hours of Eurovision

For the past few years, I have associated home delivered pizzas with sprawling teenagers, a damp cardboard box and a strong smell . But when a girl friend and I decided to join forces and watch Eurovision, we thought we had better offer a nice dinner as a sop for our less enthusiastic male partners. We knew we were going to be too busy listening to Graham Norton and criticising the acts to want to be dilly dallying in the kitchen so decided to go up market and order bake-at-home pizzas from the Pizza Makers in Chiswick.

The Pizza Makers are the newly revamped and rebranded Clever Wally's. They pride themselves on using the best quality ingredients and, that by the customer baking the pizza at home, they avoid the common pitfall of a tepid, soggy pizza base.

Back to Saturday night: to further dampen any dissent, we had a couple of drinks at the pub and ordered our pizzas from there. We then had 30 minutes to gulp our drinks, dash home and turn the oven on to maximum.

It might have been the result of a few drinks on empty stomachs, but we went mad when ordering and asked for rosemary focaccia , both a vegetable and a carnivore sharing platter and green and a goats ’ cheese salad, four of the huge 14 inch pizzas: Spicy Pepperoni, prosciutto, Artichoke and Spinach and the Carnivore, cookies and ice cream. The delivery man duly pitched up exactly on time, staggering slightly under the load.

Whilst 2 members of our group tried to swivel the TV round so we could watch it while munching, the other 2 quickly put the focaccia in the oven and dressed the salads with the little pots of vinaigrette. We stripped the four giant pizzas of their cling film, slid them off their cardboard bases and they were oven ready.

The bread, salads and sharing platters were delightful and demolishing them distracted us from the fact that the TV had refused to swivel round and so we could only listen to the Eurovision contest while staring at its back. We then put the pizzas in the oven for the prescribed 10 minutes while we criticised the Azerbaijan act and forecast nul points for those poor losers.

The pizzas came out of the oven beautifully cooked. The bases really were thin and crisp, the toppings generous without descending into a battle with stringy mozzarella and the flavours fresh and well thought out. My green Artichoke and Spinach pizza took a bit of ribbing as it didn't have any tomato on but I stood my ground and pointed out that it didn't seem to be stopping anyone from helping themselves to it. The Carnivore had loads of really nice different cured meats on top and the prosciutto pizza was a bit of a kit-pizza with the user putting parmesan shavings, rocket and prosciutto on themselves once the rest of the pizza was baked. The Spicy Pepperoni pizza was being silently devoured by a huge fan of the Pizza Express American Hot and was declared just as delicious which from this aficionado was high praise indeed.

Even the hungriest of us couldn’t manage more than half a pizza, especially after the starters we had devoured. So I can vouch that the warmed up pizza was delicious the next day, too.

We finished off with the chocolate chip cookies which I under-baked due to the necessity of being glued to the TV for the Eurovision finale.  We found we actually preferred the cookies gooey and hot and just scraped them up with spoons with a dollop of vanilla ice-cream melting into them.

The order came to £87.00, fed four greedy people on the night and 4 people at lunch the next day.

At the end of the evening, once we realised Azerbaijan had won after all and Jedward and Blue had been pipped to the post, we were sprawled across the sofas. But there was no smell and no damp cardboard in sight.

Caroline Villiers

May 19, 2011