The 5 Best Reasons to Make Pizza at Home

published Apr 24, 2013
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(Image credit: Emma Christensen)

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… 

  1. 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.  

  2. 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. 

  3. It’s Just Better: Make-at-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…

  4. People Love Pizza. Love. We are always find it gratifying to make 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 we know. 

  5. Pizza Is One of the Best Ways 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. 
All right, those are our (and Serious Eats’) best reasons to get back in the pizza swing. What are yours? What brings you back to pizza as a weeknight meal?