Can an English chef win the Pizza World Championship?

The most prestigious pizza competition in the world is starting in 15 minutes, and Danny Child’s olive oil has gone missing. Standing still as dozens of chefs bustle around him, he catches my eye. “We have had a little incident,” he says quietly. When he arrived at the prep kitchen earlier, he stashed his ingredients in a fridge but left the oil out on the counter. Now it has vanished. He suspects foul play.

Child, a softly spoken, self-deprecating 31-year-old, is the only English chef at the Pizza World Championship, an annual gathering of more than 700 chefs in Parma, northern Italy. In Naples and Rome, people hold strong opinions about pizza. Parma is more famous for its ham and parmesan, and so it is a neutral venue.

Winning, or even ranking highly, at the competition is a golden ticket for chefs, transforming their pizzerias into destination restaurants and unlocking sponsorship deals from the biggest flour, mozzarella and tomato suppliers. And there is national pride at stake: every Italian chef wants to prove their skill in front of a home crowd.

It is Child’s first time at the event and his first exposure to a competition of this intensity. In Parma, even the friendliest pizza slingers develop the single-minded intensity of Michelin-starred chefs. One remarks that he was warned never to leave his ingredients unattended and therefore open to sabotage. Many chefs have formed into teams to support each other. They wear matching outfits and carry each other’s gear. Child is not part of a team.

It is when he has only a few minutes to go before his turn in the arena that Child realises his oil is missing. He starts to gather up his ingredients: three plastic takeaway boxes full of passata, mozzarella and spicy salami, a disposable metal pie tray for his dough, a plastic squeezy bottle of honey, and a bag containing parmesan and a grater.

Having been to another big pizza show in Las Vegas, which was full of camaraderie between the chefs, he asks some Americans if he can borrow their olive oil. Unsure that they will get it back in time for their slot, they turn him down.

Child cannot speak Italian, and he doesn’t know who else to ask. I dash off to the exhibitor booths to try my luck. No one is selling olive oil, but at one stand offering tinned mushrooms, asparagus and chickpeas, a kind salesman decants some into a small plastic tub. I hand it to Child just in time and he smiles, relieved.

“Welcome to the jungle!” shouts the master of ceremonies, as the tournament begins.

A few weeks before the Pizza World Championship, I travelled to King’s Lynn in Norfolk, on England’s east coast, to visit Child’s restaurant. It happens to be shaped like a pizza slice, with a narrow entrance broadening out to an open kitchen and seating area.

Watching him shape his dough, I recalled when I first learnt to make pizza, almost 20 years ago, at a hole in the wall joint in Perugia called O Mattariello (The Rolling Pin) that sold pizza by the slice. Paolo Urciuoli, the owner, was fastidious, driving out of the city to draw water from a well in his hometown and to buy flour from his favourite mill. The result was a pizza that was tender and yielding to the bite, but with a satisfying crunch in the base. Afterwards, instead of being bloated and thirsty, Urciuoli’s pizza left a feeling of lightness in the stomach, the mark of a well-fermented and matured dough.

I begged Urciuoli to teach me, and he eventually relented. He showed me how to rest dough in the fridge at precisely 2C for at least 48 hours, to give the yeast time to break down as many of the long chains of complex carbohydrates in the flour as possible and convert them into easily digestible (and tasty) simple sugars. Add salt, but not too much, he warned, it interferes with the yeast.

He showed me the correct way to stretch the dough and how to not make it soggy with too many toppings. You should be able to manoeuvre a slice of pizza to your mouth with one hand without it collapsing, he said. He scolded me every time I tried to deviate even slightly from his teachings, such as when I got bored of stretching the dough by hand and used a rolling pin. “You must respect the tradition,” he told me.

In the world of pizza, tiny details matter. Small variations in flour, water, yeast and salt, how they are combined and rested, how they are stretched, how they are cooked and at what temperature, can yield an infinite range of results. And even chefs who turn out perfect, puffy, evenly baked pizzas in their own pizzerias can stumble under the pressure of competition and when using equipment they are unfamiliar with.

Child is ambitious, but relatively inexperienced. He worked as an electrician until the first Covid-19 lockdown, but he always nursed an ambition to make food and used to travel to Norwich for catering classes at a night school, despite plenty of ribbing. “Let’s say you are on a [building] site, and you take in a feta roulade and ask if anyone wants some? No, they do not,” he told me.

When the pandemic shut down building sites, he asked his wife Lucy, an assistant headteacher, if he could spend their savings on a pizza van. It was a hit. He expanded to the restaurant last August, selling New York-style pizzas with names inspired by people and places from a trip to the US.

He got his first taste for competition at the International Pizza Expo in Las Vegas, a glitzy trade fair, full of camaraderie and networking. But he also saw what he would be up against in Parma. “The Italians killed everyone,” he says. “I slung in some pizza, spotted those guys and then went off to drink beer and sulk. They are just so good.”

The Italians, he added, often grow up working in their parents’ pizzerias. “They don’t have to go on Google or watch YouTube to check that what they are doing is right.”

That evening, I tasted Child’s pizzas for the first time: a margherita (because he was planning at that point to make one at the competition) and an off-menu slice of Detroit-style pan pizza, topped with hot Cheetos, sour cream, guacamole and salsa. Both came out well-baked, the margherita with an Instagrammable, leopard-spotted crust. But I wondered to myself what Urciuoli would make of them.

About half the competitors in Parma are Italian, while the other half come from more than 50 countries. The foreign pizza superpowers include France and the US, which fields enough chefs to form two rival teams: the US Pizza Team (who were being followed by a camera crew making a documentary called Eyes on the Pies) and the boldly named World Pizza Champions.

The younger chefs tend to be skinny with a springy intensity, but by middle age many of the competitors have a certain silhouette: wide sloping shoulders, big strong hands and forearms. Around the midriff is the inevitable result of years of making and eating pizza, what one chef describes to me with a smile as “the Naples belt”.

In an unthinking moment, Palladino grates parmesan on to the crust for extra umami. He is immediately disqualified

All the Italians at the competition use the same shorthand to describe a truly extraordinary pizza. They hold out their forearms and waggle their fingers over the top, indicating that their hairs are standing on end. “It is the job of the pizza chef to transmit emotion from their heart to your mouth,” Paolo Moccia, last year’s champion, tells me grandly as he strides through the arena like a king, wearing a silver sequinned pork pie hat to stand out from the crowd.

Moccia describes his pizza as a “plate for the food”. “I can have a whole meal layered on top, the meat, the vegetables, the salad. Pizzas here are not your traditional pizza, they are very innovative.” Later, in an event where two chefs cook together, he produces a pizza topped with a chunky beef ragu.

There are four main events in the tournament: Classic, Naples, Roman and Pan. The biggest event, with more than 400 competitors, is the Classic. Here the only rules are that the pizza should be round and baked on the stone of the oven. Chefs use this event to show off extraordinary creations; pizzas that aspire to be Michelin-worthy, topped with luxurious ingredients that would bankrupt any pizzeria that put them on the menu.

Only one person in the Classic competition makes Italy’s most popular pizza, the simple margherita. Instead, like a modern motor show, the competition is full of prototypes and cutting-edge ideas, some of which might eventually trickle down to the public in months or even years.

The Naples STG (traditional speciality guaranteed) competition is the diametric opposite. Here, chefs can only make a margherita or marinara pizza, with a maximum diameter of 35cm and a thickness in the centre of just 0.4cm, rising to a crust of 1cm to 2cm. Only flour, salt, yeast and water are allowed in the dough, the mozzarella must come from Campania and the pizzas must be baked in a wood-fired oven. The rules are so strict that almost a third of the 71 competitors are eventually disqualified.

In this competition, I cheer on Diego Palladino, who runs Pizza Metro in London. His dough, made with water from Naples, his hometown, has been resting in a coolbox in his van for four days. “It was perfect,” he says, after watching it “explode” upwards beautifully in the oven. But in an unthinking moment he grates parmesan on to the crust for extra umami. He is immediately disqualified.

In the Pan pizza competition, I taste an extraordinary Detroit pizza, with a hole in the centre, made by Melissa Rickman from Fort Lupton near Denver. Detroit pizzas are famous for their “frico” edge, where the cheese melts and then crusts against the side of the pan. Rickman has brought a custom rectangular pan with a raised centre to create a double frico: a crust on the inside too. It is her first time at the competition and she takes five minutes before going on stage to calm herself. “I competed in a swimsuit at a beauty pageant last year,” she says. “I’m as nervous now as I was then.” The judges are clearly excited by her pizza though, waggling their fingers over their forearms. “She’s definitely in the running,” says one, who admits to a penchant for American pizza, despite it breaking all the rules of the Italian tradition.

In the Classic competition, Child’s pizza does not go to plan. He decided on an electric oven, with a rotating stone inside to cook the pizza evenly. But because he is competing early, the stone has not had time to warm to its maximum heat, making it harder to crisp the base of his pizza. And anyway, the oven is set to 300C, far cooler than his oven in Norfolk. He will have to judge by sight whether or not his pizza is cooked.

A technical judge stands to one side, marking him out of 100 on his appearance, how he handles his pizza and how he uses the oven. Later, four tasting judges will mark his pizza, awarding up to 200 points each. Before he even starts, I notice that unlike all the other chefs, who are wearing white, Child is dressed head to toe in black, with a black apron. As a result he now has white floury handprints all over his trousers. This might not be a good look. He seems nervous as he spreads his passata with a tablespoon, rather than a ladle.

Child stretches his pizza over a mesh plate, to allow air to circulate underneath and puts it in the oven. The Classic competition has only two rules and this breaks one of them. He takes the pizza out when it looks done, then grates his parmesan awkwardly into a pile on the pizza. I cross my fingers.

Called up to the stand by the presenter, Child hits the language barrier. Asked by the judges how he made the dough, he shrugs, bemused. Even though it is a high-profile event, full of foreign competitors, the world championship is conducted solely in Italian. Some teams, including those from the US, bring their own translators to help them present their pizzas. The chefs without those resources are at a disadvantage. As well as the taste of the pizza, the judges are looking for a compelling narrative. One French chef tells me the “story” of his pizza is that it represents a walk in his local woods in autumn, where he stops every so often to collect a different type of wild mushroom.

After walking back from the judging table, Child cuts up his pizza to taste it. He offers me a slice, with hope in his eyes. I tell him the crust is underbaked, soft and doughy. He looks crestfallen.

On the third and final day, the main events conclude at lunchtime and the tension breaks. There is a wave of post-exam euphoria as the chefs gather to watch acrobatic events. In one of them, chefs compete to stretch a pizza as large as they can, transforming into giant white jellyfish as they drape dough over their heads and vibrate it gently. Then there is a spectacle of chefs throwing and tossing pizzas, dancing to music as they juggle three or four discs at a time. Some of the American chefs even throw and catch dough with their feet.

That evening, tables are laid for the awards banquet, at which only the starters are pizza. I wonder how the foreign chefs will rank. The championships have felt truly global and, at the dinner, one section celebrates the highest-ranked chefs from each country, bringing them up on stage as their flags show on screen. But I worry about the language gap, given the eloquence of some of the Italian chefs, and about whether the all-Italian line-up of judges would instinctively prefer more traditional pizza. Domenico Iacobone, one of the judges, reassures me this is not the case. “We do not have any preconceived ideas about what the pizza should be like,” he says. “We do not know if something will be traditional or extreme. We are trying to understand where the chef is coming from, to understand the story of the pizza and connect it to the taste.”

As the first, second and third placed winners are read out, it becomes clear that the Italians have triumphed. They take 10 of the 12 podium places on offer in the four main competitions. An American finishes second in the Pan pizza competition and a French chef places second in the Classic.

The winner of the Classic is Giuseppe Criminisi, from Pisa, whose pizza was topped with a cream of porcini mushrooms from Garfagnana, buffalo mozzarella from Paestum, Vastedda del Belice, a stringy cheese made from raw sheep’s milk, 40-month-old parmesan, sautéed porcini mushrooms, blowtorched Cinta Senese bacon, peach and white truffle honey, toasted Avola almonds and shavings of black truffle.

As the event draws to a close, teams of Italian chefs run whooping through the hall, embracing each other, as “We are the Champions” plays over the sound system. The full rankings drop the next day. Palladino from London comes 30th in the Classic competition. He thinks he would have challenged for a medal in the Naples competition if he had not been disqualified.

Out of the 429 competitors, Child has finished in last place. Even before competing, he worried that people at home would judge him if he failed, and now he is anxious about what to say on his social media accounts, and the risk he has taken with his young business. “I’m gutted,” he says.

Shortly afterwards, he puts out a post explaining what happened, and vowing to return in 2024. His followers are full of sympathy and congratulate him for taking part. “The only person who is beating himself up is me,” he says.

In the weeks that follow, his social media feed is even busier with announcements, including a new touring pizza van. Lucy is expecting their second child, and the future seems full of hope. “I have started planning for next year,” he says. “Just in general, thinking about what we are going to do for a platter [to serve the pizza on]. I want something really British, but then I’m thinking I’m not sure how much they will want to see that.” And he has made a deal to borrow the US team’s translator.

Malcolm Moore is the editor of FT Edit, an app that brings you eight important stories every weekday

Follow @FTMag on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first