The last time I set foot in any kind of professional kitchen was as a distracted teenager working in a café each Saturday.

I hated it. Not only was I totally rubbish at making those semi-translucent fried eggs they have in those places, but I was relegated many times over until I found my natural place in the order of things operating the dishwasher.

It was with a certain amount of trepidation, then, that I joined some of the staff at the city's new Pizza Express to learn a bit about how they put their meals together. Thankfully, my mentor for the day was Karim Khedri, head chef at the Stamford branch, who has a lot of experience training new staff, and isn't prone to the kind of anguished shouting that passed for "discussion" at my old Saturday job.

After getting changed into the stripey uniform, I started out by learning a bit about dough management. The dough that forms the pizza bases, garlic breads and dough balls served at the restaurant has to be treated well, and Karim explained that this is the first step in becoming a pizza chef.

"When people start, we have them working with the dough first, because getting it right is very important to the taste," he said.

Given the fact that I don't do much in the way of baking or pastry rolling at home, the opportunity to manipulate the Plasticine-like dough was a really enjoyable, tactile experience.

I started off making the dough balls, a fairly simple procedure, but I was soon pounding out some of the garlic breads and dough sticks that are served with the salads.

Karim is a naturally encouraging chap, and there was something fairly satisfying about watching them all stack up. After they'd been put into pans, the starters were all ready for the lunch service, which kicked off at noon.

Next, we had to prepare some of the pizza bases so they were ready in time to have toppings applied when people began to order. The key point here was that the pizza bases couldn't be made any earlier than 20 minutes before they would be topped, cooked and served. As I mentioned earlier, your lump of dough is a volatile creature, prone to drying out and becoming unworkable, so the bases had to be prepared as close to the opening of the restaurant as possible to ensure optimum taste.

Again, manipulating the dough was great fun, but tricky to get right at first. I realised quite quickly that the chances of me suspending a revolving pizza base above my head was unlikely as I struggled to make anything other than grossly mis-shapen bases.

Like anything, however, practice makes perfect, and after a number of botched attempts, I was able to get quicker and the bases were losing their elliptical character and becoming rounder. Each of the bases had to be put into different sized pans – a smaller one for the kids' pizzas the restaurant serves, a classic size and a very thin, larger pizza called the Romano.

By now, the other chaps in the open-plan kitchen were preparing all manner of different things, and the wonderful smells of basil and garlic were soon filling the place.