There can’t be many people who don’t enjoy sinking their teeth into a freshly cooked pizza covered with lashings of cheese, tomato sauce and all their favourite flavourings. Pizzas now rate as one of the top fast foods, universally enjoyed throughout the world.

One of the joys of eating pizzas is that they can be shared and eaten using your fingers rather than a knife and fork and, of course, they can be cooked to order, each one coming with your favourite tastes and toppings.

Isam Jajawi, head pizza chef of the recently revamped Red Lion, in Kidlington, has been cooking pizza for years and is confident there’s not much he doesn’t know about getting them right so that the base is crisp on the outside and deliciously soft inside.

Most of the pizzas he bakes are large, but he also produces a sharing dish of tiny pizzas which take your taste buds on a gastronomic journey. He calls it the Seven Wonders of the World as the toppings include: Tikka chicken American, Thai sweet chilli king prawn, Moroccan spiced chicken, Margherita, Serrano ham and Spanish chorizo and crispy duck with hoisin. It’s one of the most popular dishes he serves, though his Mediterranean-style meat medley, made up of salami, chorizo, prosciutto crudo, pepperoni and meatballs, all of which can be spiced up with fresh red and green chillies, sells particularly well too. For vegetarians there’s a pizza covered with roast vegetables, peppers and flat mushrooms, finished with pesto and rocket, or a four cheese pizza covered with Camembert, mozzarella, Taw Valley mature Cheddar and Italian cheese and finished with rocket.

The Red Lion is now incorporated into the Orchid pub chain, which is the fifth largest managed pub retailer in the UK with almost 300 outlets, though the pizza-themed menu that Isam cooks is not served in many of their outlets yet. Hand-made pizzas are the chain’s latest idea, with the promise that their pizzas will always be made from 100 per cent fresh dough, each one shaped and styled by hand. They are even tossed in the air and hand-stretched once the raw dough has been rolled to shape to ensure a perfect finish. Watching Isam throw the pizza, catch it, stretch it and then throw it again is rather like watching a skilled cocktail barman mixing a drink.

To enable the dough base to puff up properly and to cook the topping so that the cheese melts and the chosen ingredients blend into it, the classic pizza is cooked in a wood oven at 400C (750F). Isam, however, choses to cook his pizzas at 290C in a specially-designed stainless steel pizza oven.

Although the archetype of modern pizzas remains the napoletana, which originates from Naples, exactly what constitutes an authentic Neapolitan is still hotly debated.

As flat breads to pizza have been cooked since Neolithic times, records of wild herbs and various ingredients added to give it extra flavour thread their way through history. Today, toppings vary widely. The Russians are known to top their pizzas with red herrings, whereas the Brazilians go for green peas and the Indians enjoy pickled ginger minced with cheese.

Regardless of its topping, ideally the pizza dough is made from triple OO flour, which is ground finer than normal flour and gives the dough a super-smooth texture. The only other ingredients required to obtain a perfect pizza dough are fine sea salt, dried yeast, caster sugar, lukewarm water and a little extra virgin olive oil. Just the ingredients we use for bread.