13 ms·

Sorry for the tangent but... About a year ago I started making my own pizza instead of ordering it in. Not only do a save a lot of money but it is a higher qua

by throwaway2016a 9y ago

Sorry for the tangent but... About a year ago I started making my own pizza instead of ordering it in. Not only do a save a lot of money but it is a higher quality product. It takes about a half hour of prep so I only do it on weekends. I found a quick crust recipe that doesn't require waiting for hours for the dough to rise [1]. The ingredients are just bread flour, yeast, water, salt, olive oil, and sugar. The toppings and sauce are the most expensive parts. Though I'm sure if I made the sauce from scratch I could shave a dollar but probably not worth the effort. Tip: buying a jar of yeast is MUCH cheaper than the pre-measured packets that only make one pizza. Those are a rip off. A jar is almost the same price and makes 15 pizzas instead of 1. [1] http://allrecipes.com/recipe/20171/quick-and-easy-pizza-crust/ http://allrecipes.com/recipe/20171/quick-and-easy-pizza-crus...

Lewton 9y ago
> About a year ago I started making my own pizza instead of ordering it in. Not only do a save a lot of money but it is a higher quality product. Unless you have a wood oven, you need to find better pizzarias to order from
- chris_7 9y ago
  Beating delivery/take-out at home isn't really unreasonable, unless you live on top of the pizzeria or something. It loses a lot in the box, with a baking steel preheated under the broiler, your homemade and immediately eaten pie will probably be better. But yeah, you're not going to best Paulie Gee's or whatever with your home oven that tops out at 550°F. I don't really get delivery food in general, would much rather just walk to the restaurant.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    I eat out a lot because I do a lot of business travel. I don't get food delivery at home because I don't really have any options I like. But I do pickup takeout sometimes. It can just be nice to relax at home rather than eating at a restaurant.
- ashark 9y ago
  I can beat all but the really good "fast food"-style pizza (the kind people stop to pick up a stack of pies to take home on their way through town) with my lesser dough recipe (uses a bread machine) and mid-tier ingredients, with a 550F oven and a stone. Yeah, you can't get the char and crust consistency of an 800F+ oven, but you can get closer than you might think for 1/3 the price of a typical wood/coal oven place, and even corner-cutting time-saving approaches will (easily) produce better food than you'd get from all but the best fast food pizza places. Don't discourage people from cooking their own pizza. Even without special equipment you can cook some yummy stuff in the $4-$7/pie price range.
tluyben2 9y ago
Making pizza, especially if you have a wood fired oven, is a lot of fun I find. I usually make pizzas for 10-15 people who we invite over and when the fire dies down, I bake bread. Much nicer (and cheaper) than ordering. There are ofcourse (enough) pizza places who can beat it on quality, but not when ordering in imho.
graphitezepp 9y ago
I think your underselling how cheap yeast is when you forgo the 'convenience tax'. I get WAY more than 15 pizzas worth of risen dough from a ~5 dollar jar.
- throwaway2016a 9y ago
  15 is my estimate. It could be more, I never counted. I just know one jar lasts me over three months and I make an average of one pizza a week.
mpcovcd 9y ago
For anyone reading this and interested in making their own pizzas, pizzamaking.com is an amazing resource for making pizza at home. Great pizza is all about the temperature it cooks at, and most home ovens can't reach the needed temp of 600F+ for NY style and 900F+ for Neapolitan style pizza. The Blackstone pizza oven is highly recommended, and for for less than $300, it reaches temps of 800F+ and churns out amazing pizzas at home in less than 5 mins of cooking time.
- Alupis 9y ago
  While extra high temperatures and/or fancy ovens will certainly make a better pizza, it's not a requirement for making great pizza at home, even when using raw pizza dough (store bought or home made) and throwing it yourself. The better your crust, the better the pizza, but heck, even using pre-made Boboli pizza crust can yield a good tasting home-made pizza. Although, I'd certainly recommend getting some dough from your local grocery store and throwing it yourself... it's a skill that's surprisingly satisfying to learn and to get good at, plus it makes the entire experience a ton more fun and enjoyable (and it'll impress guests as well)! Pizza is very easy to make, and can be a lot of fun!
  - wastedhours 9y ago
    I'd also say you can mitigate some of the temperature differential by making sure you have a pre-heated surface in the oven. An upturned (perforated or not) baking sheet in an as-hot-as-it-can-go oven for an hour or so makes a decently hot base for the crust.
    - Alupis 9y ago
      > An upturned (perforated or not) baking sheet in an as-hot-as-it-can-go Or a pizza stone if you have one (they're fairly inexpensive usually). But a pizza stone is a single-tasker kitchen gadget (thanks Alton), where-as the baking sheet is a multi-tasker with more utility. Both will do wonders for getting a more crispy crust!
      - 9y ago
twothamendment 9y ago
I buy pizza, but make mostly make my own. Try making your dough a day or two ahead of time and put it in the fridge until you need it. It will taste better, less yeasty as quick breads tend to be. It also means you can throw some together at whatever hour suits you and have it ready to go for another day. I've tried it with many dough recipes and they always turn out better. You don't have to go to this extreme, but it gives you an idea: http://www.bakingsteel.com/blog/72-hour-pizza-dough http://www.bakingsteel.com/blog/72-hour-pizza-dough
- maxerickson 9y ago
  In the American vernacular, "quick bread" is a bread made with some leavening other than yeast. I'd also say that a short rise dough recipe barely has any flavor from the yeast. Sitting in the fridge adds flavor.
- throwaway2016a 9y ago
  It's a trade off for my poor planning. The recipe I put actually comes out well, still better than fast food pizza and pretty close to the mom & pop pizza places. But yeah, if I had better planning and time management I would let it rise :)
badloginagain 9y ago
Don't you need a dough mixer as the amount of kneeding necessary to get the right consistency is a hassle?
- galago 9y ago
  I only knead the dough a few times so that it comes together and form it into a ball. I then leave it overnight in the fridge. There's a lot of mythos around 'developing the gluten' and whatnot, but I think some people just repeat it without performing actual tests to see what matters. The NY Times no-knead bread recipe is where I first learned about this.
icc97 9y ago
Even if you just buy a pizza base and then add the toppings yourself you end up with a better pizza than take out. I'd rather experiment with the toppings rather than the pizza dough making. This works even better with my 4yo daughter. I find that there's very little extra time spent putting the toppings on and cooking vs ordering, waiting and collecting from the door. This can then be done any night of the week.
BlackjackCF 9y ago
Yup, this. I started making my own pizzas because my ex was celiac's and I was lactose intolerant, which is a recipe for garbage pizzas when you go out. Bought Trader Joe's cauliflower crust and started making my own pizzas. Delicious.
mbesto 9y ago
> It takes about a half hour of prep so I only do it on weekends. > Not only do a save a lot of money So, it's not cheaper.
- brianwawok 9y ago
  Well, presumably most of us are not getting paid by the hour to work on weekends. So no, you are not giving up a paid hour of consulting to make the pizza.
- twothamendment 9y ago
  Outside of work there aren't many things I do that are "worth the money". Is it worth the money to bake pizza? Not if you compare the cost of a chain pizza vs what I make on average when I'm working. I do so many things at home that are not "worth my time", but if I could trade doing them for more hours sitting at my desk would I do it? No! I spend enough time working. Some people enjoy cooking, gardening, yard work, etc. There are days that pulling weeds is a nice break from sitting at a desk. I'd never want to work every waking hour at my job so someone can cook, clean and take care of my house for me. Some things I do - are they worth the money? Not a chance. Worth my time? That all depends on how you'd rather spend your time.
- throwaway2016a 9y ago
  1. Your discounting that some people (myself included) enjoy cooking so it is a liesure activity. 2. The whole "my time is worth X at work so it is worth paying X to not spend time doing something myself" is a fallacy. That only applies if there is opportunity cost involved. 3. Unless you pay even more for delivery or the pizza place is right next door, it will take you 15+ minutes to drive there, pick up the pizza, and come back.
vkjv 9y ago
How much does it cost you to make a single pie? How big is it? I also make my own pizza and it is very tasty; however, I find it incredibly difficult to beat the $6.99 2-topping medium pizza deal for pick-up.
- throwaway2016a 9y ago
  About $4 +/- $2 depending on what toping I use (meat costs more). 14 inches. Probably enough to make the equivalent of 2 mediums. Pizza is more expensive here though. I can't get 2 mediums for that price.
lorenzhs 9y ago
I happen to have recently turned 160kg of flour, 100kg of tomato sauce, 70kg of mozzarella cheese and 160kg of various toppings into pizza over the span of five days (with many helping hands) at a Dutch hacker camp, SHA2017. See https://twitter.com/pizzahackery https://twitter.com/pizzahackery for some nice pictures etc. We had a used 14.4kw (yup, 14,400W) electric oven. Some of our observations: - Letting dough rest really makes a difference. I know, it requires planning etc and I'm impatient and I don't really do it at home either. The best batches we had had risen for 30min outside and then ~20h in the fridge (or in our case, a cooling truck). Even more time would likely help, two to three days seems to be the agreed-upon number, but we didn't have the storage capacity for that. You also don't need a whole lot of yeast when doing that, we used various amounts but 75g dried yeast was plenty for 10kg of flour with a slow rise. - Quality flour makes a difference, too. We tried several from the cheapest supermarket flour (32ct/kg) to some really nice organic stoneground flour (~1.3€/kg) and the latter is nicer to knead and makes for a better crust. I was sceptical, too (flour is flour, right?), but it really does make a difference if you're going for maximum yummies. - Oven temperature is important. Whatever your oven's max temperature is, go for that (unless it's a pottery oven), and use a pizza stone or something (and let it heat up for a while), it adds thermal capacity, i.e. the oven won't cool down as much when you put in the pizza. We bought a used pizza oven (picture: https://twitter.com/leonhandreke/status/893173017722982400 https://twitter.com/leonhandreke/status/893173017722982400) that reaches 500°C (930°F), which is pretty impossible at home, but that allowed us to scale the whole thing. At that temperature, pizza takes around 4 minutes to cook (on a screen, less if you put it on the stones directly, but that's a logistical nightmare with 60x80 cm pizzas) and it's perfect. You get the nice browning of the crust without burning the cheese, and the base isn't soggy. - Sauce is cheap, cheese isn't. For the sauce, either use polpa fine (quite nice) or passata / sieved tomatoes thickened with some tomato paste. Add oregano and basil. - We didn't have the time and skill to throw the pizza, we rolled it out. Our trays are 60x80 cm so throwing would have been very different. It was still very nice. Maybe throwing would have taken it up another notch, but it wasn't possible for us. It was an amazing project and people loved it. We gave it away as free pizza with a donations box and the sum of donations exceeded our expectations. We're donating the entire surplus to the EFF, we still have to return some equipment (outstanding deposits), but it's going to be a sizeable amount. A+ experience, would make pizza for hackers again. Maybe I should write an account of the whole operation and post it :)
fapjacks 9y ago
I'd like to also mention that making your own mozzarella is incredibly easy and worthwhile [0]. I started making my own cheese of all kinds recently, which has been a thoroughly worthwhile time and money investment. But especially when my wife wants to make her cauliflower pizza, I make a big batch of this mozzarella for toppings. This Australian guy Gavin Webber has tons of great instructional videos on Youtube. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VbuBcNCgAc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VbuBcNCgAc
pasbesoin 9y ago
I may be wrong -- and I don't mind working dough, myself. But I seem to recall from helping my parents (well, mother) with their bread maker, that there is a pizza dough mode. I gather this would prepare the dough, without (obviously) baking it.

Lewton 9y ago

> About a year ago I started making my own pizza instead of ordering it in. Not only do a save a lot of money but it is a higher quality product. Unless you have a wood oven, you need to find better pizzarias to order from

chris_7 9y ago
Beating delivery/take-out at home isn't really unreasonable, unless you live on top of the pizzeria or something. It loses a lot in the box, with a baking steel preheated under the broiler, your homemade and immediately eaten pie will probably be better. But yeah, you're not going to best Paulie Gee's or whatever with your home oven that tops out at 550°F. I don't really get delivery food in general, would much rather just walk to the restaurant.
- ghaff 9y ago
  I eat out a lot because I do a lot of business travel. I don't get food delivery at home because I don't really have any options I like. But I do pickup takeout sometimes. It can just be nice to relax at home rather than eating at a restaurant.
ashark 9y ago
I can beat all but the really good "fast food"-style pizza (the kind people stop to pick up a stack of pies to take home on their way through town) with my lesser dough recipe (uses a bread machine) and mid-tier ingredients, with a 550F oven and a stone. Yeah, you can't get the char and crust consistency of an 800F+ oven, but you can get closer than you might think for 1/3 the price of a typical wood/coal oven place, and even corner-cutting time-saving approaches will (easily) produce better food than you'd get from all but the best fast food pizza places. Don't discourage people from cooking their own pizza. Even without special equipment you can cook some yummy stuff in the $4-$7/pie price range.

tluyben2 9y ago

Making pizza, especially if you have a wood fired oven, is a lot of fun I find. I usually make pizzas for 10-15 people who we invite over and when the fire dies down, I bake bread. Much nicer (and cheaper) than ordering. There are ofcourse (enough) pizza places who can beat it on quality, but not when ordering in imho.

graphitezepp 9y ago

I think your underselling how cheap yeast is when you forgo the 'convenience tax'. I get WAY more than 15 pizzas worth of risen dough from a ~5 dollar jar.

throwaway2016a 9y ago
15 is my estimate. It could be more, I never counted. I just know one jar lasts me over three months and I make an average of one pizza a week.

mpcovcd 9y ago

For anyone reading this and interested in making their own pizzas, pizzamaking.com is an amazing resource for making pizza at home. Great pizza is all about the temperature it cooks at, and most home ovens can't reach the needed temp of 600F+ for NY style and 900F+ for Neapolitan style pizza. The Blackstone pizza oven is highly recommended, and for for less than $300, it reaches temps of 800F+ and churns out amazing pizzas at home in less than 5 mins of cooking time.

Alupis 9y ago
While extra high temperatures and/or fancy ovens will certainly make a better pizza, it's not a requirement for making great pizza at home, even when using raw pizza dough (store bought or home made) and throwing it yourself. The better your crust, the better the pizza, but heck, even using pre-made Boboli pizza crust can yield a good tasting home-made pizza. Although, I'd certainly recommend getting some dough from your local grocery store and throwing it yourself... it's a skill that's surprisingly satisfying to learn and to get good at, plus it makes the entire experience a ton more fun and enjoyable (and it'll impress guests as well)! Pizza is very easy to make, and can be a lot of fun!
- wastedhours 9y ago
  I'd also say you can mitigate some of the temperature differential by making sure you have a pre-heated surface in the oven. An upturned (perforated or not) baking sheet in an as-hot-as-it-can-go oven for an hour or so makes a decently hot base for the crust.
  - Alupis 9y ago
    > An upturned (perforated or not) baking sheet in an as-hot-as-it-can-go Or a pizza stone if you have one (they're fairly inexpensive usually). But a pizza stone is a single-tasker kitchen gadget (thanks Alton), where-as the baking sheet is a multi-tasker with more utility. Both will do wonders for getting a more crispy crust!
    - 9y ago

twothamendment 9y ago

I buy pizza, but make mostly make my own. Try making your dough a day or two ahead of time and put it in the fridge until you need it. It will taste better, less yeasty as quick breads tend to be. It also means you can throw some together at whatever hour suits you and have it ready to go for another day. I've tried it with many dough recipes and they always turn out better. You don't have to go to this extreme, but it gives you an idea: http://www.bakingsteel.com/blog/72-hour-pizza-dough http://www.bakingsteel.com/blog/72-hour-pizza-dough

maxerickson 9y ago
In the American vernacular, "quick bread" is a bread made with some leavening other than yeast. I'd also say that a short rise dough recipe barely has any flavor from the yeast. Sitting in the fridge adds flavor.
throwaway2016a 9y ago
It's a trade off for my poor planning. The recipe I put actually comes out well, still better than fast food pizza and pretty close to the mom & pop pizza places. But yeah, if I had better planning and time management I would let it rise :)

badloginagain 9y ago

Don't you need a dough mixer as the amount of kneeding necessary to get the right consistency is a hassle?

galago 9y ago
I only knead the dough a few times so that it comes together and form it into a ball. I then leave it overnight in the fridge. There's a lot of mythos around 'developing the gluten' and whatnot, but I think some people just repeat it without performing actual tests to see what matters. The NY Times no-knead bread recipe is where I first learned about this.

icc97 9y ago

Even if you just buy a pizza base and then add the toppings yourself you end up with a better pizza than take out. I'd rather experiment with the toppings rather than the pizza dough making. This works even better with my 4yo daughter. I find that there's very little extra time spent putting the toppings on and cooking vs ordering, waiting and collecting from the door. This can then be done any night of the week.

BlackjackCF 9y ago

Yup, this. I started making my own pizzas because my ex was celiac's and I was lactose intolerant, which is a recipe for garbage pizzas when you go out. Bought Trader Joe's cauliflower crust and started making my own pizzas. Delicious.

mbesto 9y ago

> It takes about a half hour of prep so I only do it on weekends. > Not only do a save a lot of money So, it's not cheaper.

brianwawok 9y ago
Well, presumably most of us are not getting paid by the hour to work on weekends. So no, you are not giving up a paid hour of consulting to make the pizza.
twothamendment 9y ago
Outside of work there aren't many things I do that are "worth the money". Is it worth the money to bake pizza? Not if you compare the cost of a chain pizza vs what I make on average when I'm working. I do so many things at home that are not "worth my time", but if I could trade doing them for more hours sitting at my desk would I do it? No! I spend enough time working. Some people enjoy cooking, gardening, yard work, etc. There are days that pulling weeds is a nice break from sitting at a desk. I'd never want to work every waking hour at my job so someone can cook, clean and take care of my house for me. Some things I do - are they worth the money? Not a chance. Worth my time? That all depends on how you'd rather spend your time.
throwaway2016a 9y ago
1. Your discounting that some people (myself included) enjoy cooking so it is a liesure activity. 2. The whole "my time is worth X at work so it is worth paying X to not spend time doing something myself" is a fallacy. That only applies if there is opportunity cost involved. 3. Unless you pay even more for delivery or the pizza place is right next door, it will take you 15+ minutes to drive there, pick up the pizza, and come back.

vkjv 9y ago

How much does it cost you to make a single pie? How big is it? I also make my own pizza and it is very tasty; however, I find it incredibly difficult to beat the $6.99 2-topping medium pizza deal for pick-up.

throwaway2016a 9y ago
About $4 +/- $2 depending on what toping I use (meat costs more). 14 inches. Probably enough to make the equivalent of 2 mediums. Pizza is more expensive here though. I can't get 2 mediums for that price.

lorenzhs 9y ago

I happen to have recently turned 160kg of flour, 100kg of tomato sauce, 70kg of mozzarella cheese and 160kg of various toppings into pizza over the span of five days (with many helping hands) at a Dutch hacker camp, SHA2017. See https://twitter.com/pizzahackery https://twitter.com/pizzahackery for some nice pictures etc. We had a used 14.4kw (yup, 14,400W) electric oven. Some of our observations: - Letting dough rest really makes a difference. I know, it requires planning etc and I'm impatient and I don't really do it at home either. The best batches we had had risen for 30min outside and then ~20h in the fridge (or in our case, a cooling truck). Even more time would likely help, two to three days seems to be the agreed-upon number, but we didn't have the storage capacity for that. You also don't need a whole lot of yeast when doing that, we used various amounts but 75g dried yeast was plenty for 10kg of flour with a slow rise. - Quality flour makes a difference, too. We tried several from the cheapest supermarket flour (32ct/kg) to some really nice organic stoneground flour (~1.3€/kg) and the latter is nicer to knead and makes for a better crust. I was sceptical, too (flour is flour, right?), but it really does make a difference if you're going for maximum yummies. - Oven temperature is important. Whatever your oven's max temperature is, go for that (unless it's a pottery oven), and use a pizza stone or something (and let it heat up for a while), it adds thermal capacity, i.e. the oven won't cool down as much when you put in the pizza. We bought a used pizza oven (picture: https://twitter.com/leonhandreke/status/893173017722982400 https://twitter.com/leonhandreke/status/893173017722982400) that reaches 500°C (930°F), which is pretty impossible at home, but that allowed us to scale the whole thing. At that temperature, pizza takes around 4 minutes to cook (on a screen, less if you put it on the stones directly, but that's a logistical nightmare with 60x80 cm pizzas) and it's perfect. You get the nice browning of the crust without burning the cheese, and the base isn't soggy. - Sauce is cheap, cheese isn't. For the sauce, either use polpa fine (quite nice) or passata / sieved tomatoes thickened with some tomato paste. Add oregano and basil. - We didn't have the time and skill to throw the pizza, we rolled it out. Our trays are 60x80 cm so throwing would have been very different. It was still very nice. Maybe throwing would have taken it up another notch, but it wasn't possible for us. It was an amazing project and people loved it. We gave it away as free pizza with a donations box and the sum of donations exceeded our expectations. We're donating the entire surplus to the EFF, we still have to return some equipment (outstanding deposits), but it's going to be a sizeable amount. A+ experience, would make pizza for hackers again. Maybe I should write an account of the whole operation and post it :)

fapjacks 9y ago

I'd like to also mention that making your own mozzarella is incredibly easy and worthwhile [0]. I started making my own cheese of all kinds recently, which has been a thoroughly worthwhile time and money investment. But especially when my wife wants to make her cauliflower pizza, I make a big batch of this mozzarella for toppings. This Australian guy Gavin Webber has tons of great instructional videos on Youtube. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VbuBcNCgAc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VbuBcNCgAc

pasbesoin 9y ago

I may be wrong -- and I don't mind working dough, myself. But I seem to recall from helping my parents (well, mother) with their bread maker, that there is a pizza dough mode. I gather this would prepare the dough, without (obviously) baking it.