Affamato Pizza - Better than Papa Johns!

Pizza is one of my favourite foods and I don't think I'm alone in that. Sometimes when I am helping my daughter do her paper round delivering the Milton Keynes Citizen, the front and pages are plastered in massive pictures of pepperoni pizza in a Dominoes Pizza advert. By the time we get back, my daughter and I are salivating and wishing we were getting a takeout for dinner. As it happens, we don't get takeout pizzas very often. As someone who can make pizza starting from flour and yeast, I know that with a bit of effort we can be sitting down to a freshly cooked, tailor-made pizza whenever the mood takes us. However, I am not naive enough to appreciate that home-made pizza, however delicious and bespoke, is not the same as having a takeout. For my girls it is like being forced to make do with Gola trainers when all their friends have Nike. But on top of that, I can't emulate the flavour of a pizza cooked in a proper pizza oven and, you know, sometimes I too just want to slop on the sofa in my pyjamas, eating food that someone else has cooked out of cardboard box.

Sometimes when I am at an event selling my jams and chutneys we are fortunate enough to be sharing our day with someone making authentic pizzas. With this temptation close by it is only logical that we would succumb to pizza for our lunch. We are fortunate in Milton Keynes to have several local companies in operation and the ones that spring to mind are:

Janet's Authenic Pizza,

Stu's Oven,

and Upton Smokery

Janet's Authentic Pizza and Stu's Oven are both mobile businesses that turn up at events or can be hired for functions, and Upton Smokery open their pizza kitchen only occasionally each month. So, as lovely as these pizzas are, it is not something you can purchase on some random occasion when your have been tormented by the picture of a pepperoni pizza advert for an hour. There is a certain irony that Stu's house is on our paper round and that I shove this pizza advert through his letterbox too.

So, on the rare occasions that we do decide to get a takeout pizza we have in the past resorted to a well known brand. Despite the adverts, we usually opt for a Papa John's pizza takeout rather than Dominoes. It is easy enough to place an order online and there is no denying that we enjoy the pizzas that are delivered. Indeed, a Papa Johns pizza delivery and a sleepover were what my daughter requested as her birthday treat last year. We also had one for lunch last year on Fathers Day when Steve's two eldest children came over to make his day special. His eldest daughter is a vegan and she was able to order a vegan pizza and some dough balls with garlic dip. Discovering that the garlic dip was vegan surprised me so I read the ingredients on it and discovered it was actually a whole bunch of not particularly pleasant sounding artificial ingredients that quite put me off it. Here they are: Soybean oil, water, salt, vegetable mono & diglycerides, garlic, natural flavours, soy lechithin, lactic acid, sodium benzoate, calcium disodium EDTA, citric acid, beta carotene, vitamin A palmitate, Mmmm, tasty!

It was with great delight that I recently came across a new pizza delivery company in Milton Keynes. Affamato are based in Bletchley and offer an authentic pizza delivery service every day of the week to postcodes MK1 through to MK10. Pleased to see that I was in the delivery area I investigated further and soon decided I needed to try them out.

Excitedly I told my daughters that we would be getting a takeout pizza this week. This pleased them but when I went on to explain that we would be ordering from Affamato and not Papa John the mood changed and my eldest daughter got quite grumpy about it. This was followed by about half and hour of pleading and persuasion and complaints about me and my insistence of eating local and artisan food whenever possible like this was some sort of mental problem I have. Ahh, teenagers, you've gotta love 'em! However, I was not going to budge on this one so I threw out the ultimate threat, "Look, either we get a takeout from Affamato or I'm just going to make the pizza myself." That did it, end of whinging.

I think what caused the fuss in the first place was that my daughter is a cautious eater and she was worried that she wouldn't find a combination of toppings that she liked. She need not have worried as Affamato offer a "design a pizza" service where you can select any combination of toppings yourself from their list of 30 possibles (I noted, for future reference, that vegan cheese was one of them). And what is particularly refreshing about this is that the price stays the same regardless of what combination or how many toppings you choose. Having explained this to my daughter she was back on board and was soon excitedly designing her pizza.

In the end we ordered between the three of us, a 12" pizza, a 18" pizza and two sides. This worked out as a 12" meal deal with two sides for £16.99 and the 18" half/half pizza also for £16.99, so £33.98, which is comparable to what you would expect from a larger chain, except our pizzas had a total of 13 toppings between them. I'm no expert on pizza takeaways but nduja calebrese, roasted courgettes and asparagus don't sound like ingredients readily offered at the chains.

Once ordered it brought up a clock on my screen, counting down from 1 hour to show my expected pizza delivery time. So, there was time for me to jump in the shower and get into my pyjamas before it arrived. As it happened, before I had even got upstairs they had rung me up to query something about my order so I knew they were already processing the order. The clock was still estimating 40 minutes until delivery when the guy rang my doorbell. That was impressive service and I was glad it had only been a quick shower!

Soon we were tucking into our bespoke pizzas, one daughter enjoying her meat loaded half of the her enormous pizza, and the other chomping away at her vegetable laden half. We had mozzarella sticks and dough balls too with some sort of garlic dip. The dip didn't have any ingredient information on it but it tasted lovely - like a smooth and creamy mayonnaise with garlic and herbs in it - so that was a hit with me.

We did our best to eat the lot but were defeated so the leftovers have gone into the fridge for another day. Sated and happy on the sofa, I asked my daughters what they thought. Without hesitation they said it had been delicious and, to my pleasure, my eldest even said it was better than Papa Johns. In her world I don't think you could get a higher compliment! So next time we are being tempted by the sight of pepperoni pizza adverts and I don't feel like cooking, ironically it will be Affamato reaping the benefits of that particular advertising campaign.