Pizzanomics
December 12th, 2008Good Food is Still Cheap
I finally did the math. Shopping at Costco, buying their wonderful shredded mozzarella, I am paying about one dollar for a pizza’s worth of cheese. Two dollars, if I feel like heavy cheese.
I finally did a fairly accurate sauce-cost calculation. There are about 109 ounces of sauce in a can, by weight, and a pizza takes around 2 ounces. A can costs five bucks, roughly. So the sauce cost is somewhere in the vicinity of a dime.
Flour? Can’t say. But it’s cheap. I would guess a pie costs less than two dollars, including all ingredients except toppings.
I just took a bag of Costco cheese and broke it up and froze it in 6-ounce portions, vacuum-sealed. The phone made me do it. I programmed it in there yesterday, and today it beeped and made me get to work. I already had frozen sauce packets. I have thirteen pie setups, ready to bake, at my convenience! I just hope the cheese freezes well.
Now, if I could just find a way to make cheese pizza as colon-friendly as oatmeal…
December 12th, 2008 at 1:36 PM
Use cod liver oil instead of olive oil. That ought to do it.
December 12th, 2008 at 2:53 PM
I used to think people put vegetables on their pizza because they liked the taste. Now I think they do it to prevent the pizza from turning into cement in their innards.
December 12th, 2008 at 3:06 PM
Does the machine have to become a part of your body for you to be classified as a cyborg?
December 12th, 2008 at 5:39 PM
People put all sorts of crazy stuff on pizza. Be direct. Try putting oatmeal on as a topping.
December 12th, 2008 at 6:33 PM
You could try making the crust with wheat flour, or some combination…maybe you already have?
December 12th, 2008 at 6:48 PM
Costco: Best place for cheese. Be sure to try their Dubliner’s Irish cheese. Amazing stuff. Like hard cheddar, but a thousand times better.
December 12th, 2008 at 6:52 PM
Meat, cheese and tomato sauce on dough is a pizza. If anything else sits on your pizza it is no longer a pizza, it is a mutant. Bad Juju.
Try a adding some Metamucil in your dough mix. That might be the ticket.
December 12th, 2008 at 7:46 PM
It’s no surprise that one can eat cheap, if one is prepared to do much of the prep and cooking themselves. Picking up a bucket at KFC than to buy a whole chicken, cut it up, and fry it themselves. Hell, most people don’t know how to fry chicken anyway or own a proper cast iron skillet to cook it in.
December 12th, 2008 at 9:30 PM
I have found that rice bran pretty much goes away in tomato sauce. Just a suggestion.
December 13th, 2008 at 3:32 PM
Yes, the cheese freezes quite well. I bought a 5lbs bag and made 5 pizzas, froze the rest. Made more a few weeks later
December 13th, 2008 at 4:28 PM
I don’t understand why you want to freeze the cheese. Freezing makes it all funky and crumbly. I suppose it might not make a difference once it’s melted on pizza, or maybe it does. I know you can’t slice it anymore once you’ve frozen it. It just crumbles. If you have the room to just refrigerate it, I’d do that. It ages more that way, just like it would do at the factory. The older the cheese is, the more they charge for it.
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Tillamook has a three-year-old white cheddar that they make infrequently and then sell it at upscale groceries. It’s to die for, if not from. Ordinary extra-sharp is only aged 18 months.