From its humble beginning, sold only by street vendors in the Italian city of Naples, pizza has become much more than a delicious source of cheap food. Each year, 5 billion pizzas are sold around the world. You can find them in the frozen section of almost every supermarket, have them made fresh from the menu at a restaurant or you can travel to their roots and try an original pizza experience from a top chef in Italy.
Pizzas first came into existence as the ideal food source for poverty-stricken people in 18th-century Naples. It was cheap, easy to make and tasty to eat. These characteristics are still important, but the beauty of today’s pizzas is that they can be what you want them to be. Whether it’s topped with the smoky taste of bacon, the polarising sweetness of pineapple or the simple cheese-and-tomato Margherita, pizza can have it all. We can all imagine our own personal piece of perfect pizza, but what steps can we take to bake our pizzas to be the best they can be, according to science?