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From the Wine-of-the-Month Club's bi-monthly magazine Good Taste.

"When it comes to pizza, less is more," says Italian food guru Valentina Harris. She speaks in a somewhat incongruous posh British accent. Although she was born and grew up in Italy, and thinks and dreams in Italian, her British father taught English to Italian students and so her accent is more BBC than anything else. That said, the minute she slips into Italian you wouldn’t imagine she spoke any other tongue.

"The ingredients must speak for themselves," Valentina continues. "The tomato sauce is smeared on, so that the dough underneath is visible in patches. There must always be a two-finger-wide frame around the edge — this is so you can hold it — pizza is always eaten with your hands, never with a knife and fork. The sequence of making a pizza is as follows: dough, tomato sauce, olive oil, topping, cheese."

Valentina is a well-known overseas TV chef and prolific cookbook author. When I hear she is visiting and teaching in our neck of the woods I know I simply have to meet her. I use my food writing credentials to secure a spot on her 'bread and pizza making' day. The venue is Waterford wine estate, an effortlessly beautiful Tuscan villa (they call it Cape Mediterranean) that's all Cape sandstone, terra cotta roof tiles, citrus and lavender.

We begin by making basic Italian bread dough. Once made, this dough can be turned into foccacia, pizza or ciabatta. It's as simple as that — or is it?

Some of us are given a 'starter' — not a first course, but rather a mixture of sugar, yeast, water and a bit of dough — that acts a bit like yeast in that it 'starts' the rising process of the dough. It’s only with a starter that you can make sourdough bread. A starter can be kept in a cool environment almost forever. The oldest known starter has been alive and well for 90 years. The rest of the 'students' are given fresh and dried yeast. Much discussion ensues about Italian versus South African flour but it's decided that our local bread flour, as opposed to cake flour, with its high gluten content will work as good as any.

"The most important ingredient," intones our guru, "is air." And so the kneading begins. It’s akin to a workout at the gym and a strong upper body is an asset. Needless to say the only strong body part I own is my liver so with a bat or two of my eyelashes I get my rather sexy and terribly well-built co-student, Emmanuel, to lend a hand. Once the dough is as smooth as a baby’s bottom and floppy, it can be placed in a bowl to rest and hopefully double in size.

"The first pizza was created in Naples," says Valentina. "It was peasant street food and a staple long before the tomato was introduced to Italy." Praise be that the tomato arrived because, we’re told, the first ever pizza topping was a mixture of pork fat, garlic and crumbled bay leaves — hardly the stuff on which a fast food empire could be built.

The tomato was first introduced to Italy in the 1600s in a period known as The Spanish Gloom — due mostly to the ruling Catholics' prohibition of any activities outside of church and prayer. Now the Neapolitans were, and still are, an unruly bunch not much given to respecting authority and when this alluring new fruit was proclaimed toxic and in turn banned they were none too happy. The ban was understandable. The tomato belongs to the nightshade family, and as a close cousin of the deadly variety they presumed it too was toxic. But the tomato surfaced on the back streets as a kind of latter day Viagra — hence its name, the 'love apple'.

"Some time later the first tomato sauce appeared — it was, and still is, called La Pommarola from the word Pommadoro (golden apple) and was simply made from tomatoes cooked in olive oil." For the record — and Valentina is quite vehement about this — there is no such thing as a Neapolitan sauce.

Next came La Marinara, the first pizza topping — a mixture of tomatoes, oregano, garlic, olive oil and salt — and when the Queen of Naples experienced pregnant cravings for this peasant food, the folk at court were aghast. But it was duly delivered (the first Mr. Delivery?) and as luck would have it, it was a culinary hit. And so the pizza moved from street to table.

So back to the pizza of the day — my first real Italian pizza. The dough is pressed out to ridiculously thin proportions, lightly smeared and drizzled, then topped judiciously with paper-thin slices of salami, a hint of chilli and garlic, and a splodge of full cream, utterly sinful, Gorgonzola. Oh my, I can almost smell Naples. Once baked, the divine Waterford Sauvignon and Pecan Stream Chenin materialises and we eat, drink and laugh. Naturally, the pizza is delicious, and by the end of it the only thing I know is that I am, quite simply, high on Harris.

Basic Pizza Dough

Makes 6 single portion pizzas or focaccia

Ingredients: