Homemade Vs Delivered Pizza
I eat a lot of pizza. It’s probably my favorite everyday food. As such I have carefully analyzed the cheapest way I can purchase a good pizza. And by good, I mean a pizza with real cheese and a nice dough–not those paper-dough cheese-food pizzas you can get at fast food chains. Here’s my options for purchasing a large sausage pizza, from the cheapest option to the most expensive:
Homemade using my own dough: Dough: $.25, Cheese: $2, Sauce: $.10 (using tomatoes from the garden), Sausage: $.25, total: $2.65
The problem here is you have to think ahead and give the dough time to rise, so this option is not good on spontaneous “Let’s get pizza!” nights. However, I do make my own pizza from scratch quite often.
Homemade using the local pizzeria’s dough: Dough: $2, Cheese: $2, Sauce: $.10, Sausage: $.25, total: $4.35
When we are feeling lazy, we usually go for this option. We get a bag of the uncooked dough from a local pizza place and then use our own ingredients from there. (Trader Joes also sells uncooked dough for about $1.30 a bag. It’s not the greatest dough in the world, but it’s passable.)
Take N Bake from local grocery store, on sale: $6
I’m not a fan of grocery store pizza because they skimp on cheese. However, on sale this can be a reasonable way to get pizza.
Take N Bake from local pizza place, on sale: $6-$10
I used to use Papa Murphy’s when they first came out in the 1990s, but now their prices are so high, I don’t see the point of their pizza. If you have a coupon or get them on sale, they can be worth it but not on sale, they are around $12-$15. At that price, you might as well just get a cooked pizza. (Costco also has a Take N Bake pizza for around $10. It’s pretty good.)
A pizza from my favorite pizza place: $15
Bricks has great pizza and we go there a lot. I have no complaints about Bricks, frankly. I love that place.
A pizza from local delivery place, take out, with coupon: $18
The local pizza delivery places have good pizza. Sometimes I take advantage and order a pizza, using the coupons I get in the mail and picking the pizza up. Without the coupon, the pizza costs between $21-$22.
A pizza from local delivery place, delivered, no coupon: $25
This is a hell of a lot to spend on pizza.
(Two categories I left out are fast food pizza, as mentioned above, and frozen pizza. I have never had a frozen pizza that I thought was comparable to a homemade pizza. I just don’t like them, I guess.)
If you compare the most expensive way to get a pizza–delivered with no coupon–to the least expensive way–homemade with your own dough–you’re talking a savings of $22.35 a pizza. When you’re buying about four pizzas a month, like I do, that’s about $90 a month in savings. This is precisely why I almost always make my own pizzas. And if I do go pay for one, it’s usually to Bricks.
Here’s a recipe for making that sausage pizza at the top of the entry, courtesy of Eggs on Sunday.
