Sidney’s pizza debut

A BIG, BIG day today – Sidney’s first ever pizza. It’s big because Sidney is one quarter Italian and his mother couldn’t bear to imagine a world without pizza. The horror.

Sadly, his debut was not a taste of the pizza a taglio I wolfed down on the street as a child in Rome, or the huge, crisp, paper thin versions, bubbling with sweet tomato and mozzarella, served up in a proper pizzeria. In an ideal world it wouldn’t have been a cook-from-frozen special. But beggars can’t etcetera and thank god, in that case, for Dietary Specials.

I’m not sure how I missed their pizzas before. I think I may have balked at the rapeseed oil, unsure whether we were safe to try it, but at our last appointment with the allergist he was pretty clear that there shouldn’t be a problem. So when I stumbled across the DS deep pan mozzarella and tomato in the deep freeze at Sainsbury’s… the joy. We’ve got Sid’s second birthday looming and to find a pizza that might suit him and be edible enough for the rest of us is a wonder.

We tried it out this lunchtime. Actually, as deep freeze pizzas go it isn’t bad at all. Plenty of tasty tomato sauce and cheese; a crisp and fluffy – if bready – bottom. Nothing like the tooth-snapping beast of a gluten and egg free base I tried to cook up a few months ago. No wheat, no gluten, no eggs, no soya, no nuts (none of the Dietary Specials products contains nuts so they aren’t present on-site, although the company itself doesn’t specifically test for their presence). And even left to go cold it tastes perfectly fine – hence great for parties.

At the end of the day, though, the verdict was Sid’s.

“Like pizza,” he mused, one slice in each hand and a string of mozzarella trailing from his mouth. “Nice.”