SLICE

By: Megan Gordon
Recently Serious Eats published a piece on
their Slice blog touching on why making pizza
at home can make you happier and ends up
being easier on the pocketbook. They lay out
five detailed reasons — which, when taken
together, are more than enough to convince
even those who think good pizza only comes
out of a master pizzaiolo’s wood-fired oven.
They talk about how making pizza is fun, and
how you can actually get a better pizza at home
than from a pizza joint, in some parts of the
country. Plus… it’s Cheaper! To make pizzas at
home, even really deluxe pizzas with interesting
toppings, Serious Eats estimates it costs about
$4 per pie, which beats any sort of delivery.
Have It How You Like It: Need gluten-free
dough? No problem, if you’re cooking at home.
If you have allergies or particular affinities for
flavor combinations, making your own pizza at
home is the easy solution. It’s Just Better: Makeat-home
pizza allows you to truly control the
quality.Writer J. Kenji Lopez-Alt notes that,
“Once you’ve invested in that equipment and
have a good recipe or two under your belt, what
you can produce at home is vastly superior to
what you can get at all but a handful of the best
pizzerias in the country.”
You can certainly make a better dough and crust
at home than 95% of the pizzerias out there.
At the very least, you can control everything
going into it (the kind of cheese, the amount of
cheese, the amount of crispness of the crust)
and that will ultimately make a big difference.
And now for our own two reasons…
People Love Pizza. LOVE.
We always find it gratifying to make a good
pizza at home, because it just puts friends and
family over the moon. Making really great pizza
at home is one of the surest crowd-pleasing
dishes that we know, and it’s good at all times.
Pizza is One of the Best to Eat Seasonally.
You may not think of pizza as a seasonal dish
(which season do mozzarella and tomato sauce
belong to anyway?). But the flash heat of the
pizza oven brings out the flavor of seasonal
produce in a ravishing way. Fresh arugula in
spring, ripe tomatoes in summer, diced butternut
squash in fall, and tiny potatoes in winter —
pizza is the base for the best flavors and freshest
produce, and we love to scavenge the farmers’
market for new topping inspiration each season.
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