The dough wouldn’t budge. It wasn’t merely sticky or sticking, but fully, completely stuck, as though I’d mixed flour and yeast with BondCrete and dumped it in the oven. The fire in the far corner raged to 800 degrees as I poled in a metre-long lifter, called a peel, to try to free it. That was when the scent of my first-ever backyard wood oven pizza hit me – the smell of carbonizing San Marzano sauce and blackened fior di latte mozzarella mingled with a rather precocious bouquet of singeing knuckle hair.