Friday night is pizza night at our house-mostly because I love pizza and it is a great excuse to eat it once a week!
Now this could be quite an expensive proposition if you ordered out, but being the frugalite I am, I make my own pizza. Being somewhat lazy, I of course do it in the easiest way possible. I’ve got it worked out so that Friday night’s dinner is actually the easiest one I make all week.
About every month and a half or so I spend a day making pizza crust. This sounds like a pain, but it isn’t. I “cheat” and use my breadmaker. I measure out the ingredients for a double batch (You could try any one of THESE on recipezaar.com) then run the breadmaker through the dough setting. This takes about 1 1/2 hours on my machine.
When the dough comes out I cut it in half, roll it out on two pizza pans, prick it all over with a fork to prevent it from bubbling up, and parbake it for about 8-10 minutes in a 350 oven. Then I measure out another batch and start it going in the bread machine. All in all I’ll make about 6-8 crusts throughout the day. Each crust probably takes me about 5 minutes to put the ingredients together. There is only a few minutes of hands on time for rolling it out (I have found it rolls out best if you roll it until it starts “springing back”. Then you let it rest for about 5 minutes and try again and you can roll it out more.) It is the perfect sort of project to do in between other things (like chasing the kids around the house and making sure they aren’t killing each other)
When the pizza crusts are all parbaked and cooled, I just stack them all on top of each other with waxed paper in between and put them in my freezer. Usually after they are frozen solid I’ll wrap them all up in a couple of plastic grocery bags, but I’m not too concerned about freezer burn because we go throught them pretty quickly.
On pizza night I just preheat the oven to 400, take a frozen crust out, plop it on a pizza pan still frozen, add spaghetti sauce (I don’t bother with real pizza sauce-also you actually put it on fairly thin, don’t drench the pizza with it) sprinkle on mozzeralla and a bit of parmesean cheese (for extra flavor) and take the pepperoni out of the freezer (I keep them there so DH and Kiddos don’t eat it all as a snack) and place them on also still frozen. Stick the whole shebang in the oven for about 8-10 minutes or till the cheese is just starting to brown.
Tada! Pizza.
You could of course put whatever toppings on you want, or you could freeze them as little personal pizzas for teenagers to make quick snacks or if you have lots of folks who like different toppings. You can use the same crust and make calzones and stromboli (basic recipe for calzones and stromboli are linked from recipezaar-fill the raw dough and then freeze. Just keep the filling fairly dry and make sure your edges are well sealed).
I haven’t done an actually by item price comparison, but it is obvious that making your own is so much cheaper, especially if you buy flour and yeast in bulk or on sale.
That’s a great idea to use your bread machine and to use one day to stock up on crusts (after all, that is the one part that takes the longest when you’re making it at home.) I used to make a few crusts at a time and par-bake them, and my kids’ friends thought our pizza was delicious. I think most of those kids never got homemade food at their own homes. There is no doubt that you’re saving your family a ton of money from not eating pizza out. I hope lots of people with kids at home read your article and follow your example. Good job! Mary (goodmom on FL)
Even if you don’t have a bread machine, you can make your own dough easily. I’ll have to try the crust idea- currently I make a batch of dough, and when it is risen and such I make it into a ball and wrap it in plastic wrap and pop it in the freezer. If we are going to have pizza that day, I’ll take out a dough ball, unwrap, plop it in a big bowl and stick it in the fridge to thaw (with the wrapper over the bowl.) Or sometimes I’ll just stick it in the wrapper on the counter. Making crusts seems easier and would take up less freezer space. Mmm…pizza…