But the classic Neapolitan pizza – crisp crust with pockets of air – was born of a particularly expensive bit of kit: the wood-fired oven. Got one of those? Thought not.There's one huge difference between your oven and the one in a typical Neapolitan pizzeria: heat. You might be able to get up to around 240C (that's 475F or gas mark 9), but that's nowhere near the 700C or 800C of the traditional wood-fired version. And according to some, that's a difference the home cook simply cannot overcome. That's the view Nigella Lawson reluctantly accepts in her book, How to be a Domestic Goddess (Chatto & Windus, £20). So instead of going for a crisp traditional pizza, she gives a recipe for pizza casareccia, an alternative version with more dough and more topping.

It's a delicious alternative (see recipe, right) but it's not quite pizza. Ask other experts, however, and it seems the classic pizza may be possible after all.The pizza you see here was cooked at one of London's most famous Italian restaurants, the River Cafe. Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers's kitchens do have a wood-fired oven, so you'd expect Gray to swear by them. In fact, she tells me it's technique rather than temperature that's the key to authentic pizza, and she happily told her chef to use a conventional oven this time. The results were still fabulous.Gray's recipe (right) was given to her by Alice Waters, pioneering cook at California's Chez Panisse "When it's baked, it is crisp and and bubbly," she says.

It's easy enough to follow, but there are couple of tricks you should know before you start. First, you're aiming to get the oven as hot as possible, so allow plenty of time for it to pre-heat. Second, as Australian chef Ben O'Donoghue (a River Cafe graduate) told me, "A pizza needs to cook from the bottom up." There are all sorts of ways to ensure this happens. O'Donoghue recommends putting a terracotta tile or even some bricks into the oven to heat up, then placing the pizza on top of these.

Gray's chef used a baking stone (Marcella Hazan, author of Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking also endorses this option), which worked superbly. Others, including Dan Lepard (who supplies bread to the Italian restaurant of the moment, Locanda Locatelli) and the inimitable Antonio Carluccio, insist that a hot metal baking sheet is all you need. Which should you use? It may depend on the quirks of your oven, so you may as well start with whatever is close to hand, then try other options if you're not happy.Third tip: you may have seen chefs throwing and spinning dough to stretch it, but you don't have to – just roll it on a floured surface. Spread it as thin as you can – a golf-ball-sized clump is enough for a 10in pizza.And don't get carried away with toppings although, as Carluccio knows, that's the temptation in Britain: "I did a promotion once for a supermarket that was cooking pizza in-store. People were invited to choose their toppings, and everyone wanted to pile as much on top as possible – tomatoes, peppers, mushrooms, pepperoni, cheese, herbs..." The trick is, he says, to go easy on the toppings – such as the intense but sparing combination of radicchio, taleggio cheese, anchovies and rosemary you see here. For a tomato base, be sparing and cook the moisture out before spreading it on. O'Donoghue does a version with chopped garlic sprinkled with lemon juice, crumbled Gorgonzola, pancetta and rocket.