My brother-in-law is a quirky guy. He gets these obsessions; he gets so into something that it fills his mind for months on end and he’s unable to think about anything else. For a while, he was into surfing; every Friday, hail, rain or shine, he’d make the four-hour journey West to Sligo and spend the weekend battling the ice-cold mountainous waves. After that, he got into making curries (he probably needed some warming up). He bought every Indian cookbook he could get his hands on, got hold of a tagine and even a little tandoori oven from somewhere and spent hours researching and blending spices, and perfecting his dishes. Then he was into yoga. Then model airplanes. Then scuba-diving. For a while he was into psychology, and became obsessed with the existential phenomonological idea of the holistic view of the person (his words, not mine); he’s go around asking people he hardly knew about their childhood memories as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

At the moment, he’s into pizza making. He’s possessed with the whole process of kneading the perfect dough, allowing it to rise for just the right length of time, uniting it with the perfect sauce, and putting the two into the perfect oven at the perfect temperature. He’s built himself a stone igloo-shaped oven connected to the kitchen through a tiny door, complete with baking stones inside. He even has a couple of wooden peels; those long paddles that bakers use to place the dough in the oven, although I doubt his kitchen is long enough to accommodate them.

So it was no surprise when this year’s Christmas present from him turned out to be American Pie by Peter Reinhart. Reinhart is a master-baker and a baking teacher, and has written lots of books on baking, but this book chronicles his hunt for the perfect pizza. He and his wife go all the way to Italy; in Florence they meet a pizzaiolo who has trademarked his pizza, in Rome they witness a 7ft long pizza scrunched up like an accordion and laid flat in the oven, and in Naples they visit a packed restaurant that only serves Margherita and marinara pizzas. Then they go back across the Atlantic to New York, San Francisco, California and even Dallas to continue their hunt.

The book doesn’t tell us anything we shouldn’t know already; a great pizza balances the texture and taste of the dough with the zing of the sauce and the harmony of the toppings. But Reinhart’s enthusiasm is infectious. It’s obvious from the way he describes the snap of a particular crust or the beauty of a certain arrangement of toppings that he is truly passionate about his subject matter.

After the “pizza-hunt”, we get the recipes. This is where we can see passion turning into obsession before our very eyes; Reinhart goes into minute detail about how to cook a pizza in an oven with a baking stone, without a baking stone, with oven tiles, with a hearth kit oven insert, with a convection option and even on a barbeque. Then we get to the doughs; Napoletana Pizza dough, Roman Pizza dough, Neo-Napoletana Pizza dough, New York-Style Pizza dough, Pizza Americana dough, Sourdough pizza dough. Anyway, you get the message; like I said earlier, this man is serious about pizzas. I’ve tried a few of the doughs (not the Chicago Deep-Dish Pizza-Pie dough; we are in Europe after all), and they’ve risen beautifully and crisped up perfectly, even in humble standard oven. I’m not sure if every dough variety needs a different recipe and four more pages of explanation, when he could just have written “Add half a cup more flour”, but that’s fanaticism for you I suppose.

The toppings are more unusual; there’s a great, very simple recipe for caramelized garlic and garlic purée. There’s a sweet-and-sour onion marmalade and even a butternut squash purée, although I have to admit, the idea of butternut squash on a pizza doesn’t appeal to me at all.

Then the pizzas themselves; pizza alla pugliese, pizza vesuvio, pizza rosa al bianco, white clam pizza, candied figs, pecan andouille and goat cheese pizza, onion marmalade, walnuts and blue cheese pizza, the list goes on and you’re not going to run out of pizza ideas any time soon.

Like my brother-in-law Peter Reinhart is a fanatic. He takes his pizzas very, very seriously. And even if you never try a single recipe from this book, it’s going to make you feel like eating an awful lot of pizza.