> but the overall quality of your average slice in the city has definitely suffered
This is true of the big national chains, too. They've kept prices relatively stable for damn near 25 years, at this point, but quality has gotten far worse over that same time span. That mouth-watering Pizza Hut pie you remember from 1992 isn't all nostalgia—every now and then I find single-location or small-chain joints that make pizza very similar to how I remember those tasting. Thing is, those are like $15+ a pie now, with a coupon or special. But you can still get larges for $8 or less (coupon or special, which are available 100% of the time) at the major chains—they're just not the same pizza you were getting in the 80s up to about the late 90s.
[EDIT] In fact, the 2020-on inflation is the first time I've seen the big chains seriously give in on keeping price increases in check. They've gone up like 20% in the last couple years.
Pizza Hut pan pizza is the easiest pizza to make yourself at home. You don't need a stand mixer, it's a no knead recipe (long overnight rise builds all the gluten). You don't need a fancy super hot oven, it just cooks at 400 degrees F in a cast iron skillet. Give this recipe a shot, it's unbelievably good and very accessible: https://www.seriouseats.com/foolproof-pan-pizza-recipe or https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-srfPL5CWZs
The Ligurian focaccia recipe brines it with salt water, which you don't strictly have to do but helps considerably, and bakes at 450F, which arguably so should any cast-iron pizza because the crust won't crisp up as much at 400F.
Focaccia is basically pizza without the sauce so I'm not sure if the clarification is helpful? Wikipedia claims that some places even call focaccia pizza bianca
There is no way that New York style pizza can be compared to Focaccia. They have almost nothing in common. Now that Chicago thing, maybe. But as far as I'm concerned, that's not pizza.
No one said this was NY style. The original comment was lamenting that Pizza Hut pan pizza doesn't taste as good as it did in the 80s and 90s. I pointed out recipes that directly mimic that classic pan pizza style. Pizza Hut is not and has never claimed to be New York style pizza. It's an entirely different style that's neither New York nor Chicago style. It's closest to Detroit style pizza.
Pizza by ingredients is just flour, water, salt, yeast. All the details and differences are in hydration and how it is mixed/kneaded/baked. It really is the definition of "the devil is in the details".
Yes and if you've had a Pizza Hut pan pizza it tastes just like a buttery focaccia bread smothered in cheese and sauce.
The ATK recipe at 400 degrees works because you cook it on the very bottom rack right next to the heating element. Then when it's done you cook it longer on your range at medium heat to really crisp the crust--it's in a cast iron pan after all. You can get the crust as toasty as you want.
I've got about as good a home pizza game as one can have without a modded or specialty oven, and can confirm, cast iron pan pizza is the perfect place for a newbie to start. The transfer from peel to cook surface is the most likely thing to go catastrophically wrong for someone starting out—pan pizza eliminates that step. No special equipment needed whatsoever—no peel, no stone, don't even need farina or coarse cornmeal on-hand. You can just cut it with a chef's knife or a cleaver (those are better than those stupid round-blade spinning cutters, anyway, and they're not that much worse than the long rocking-blade variety). About the only way to ruin it beyond fixing is to forget about it in the oven. It's an almost fool-proof dish, and great for building confidence that you can make good pizza at home.
I just make the pizza on parchment paper on the counter, and then pick up the whole thing and transfer it, with the paper, to the pizza stone in the oven
This is an OK alternative to my peel-method posted below, but it can be tough not to let the toppings pile toward the center, since it tends to bow downward in the middle. I've done it before, it works alright.
I eventually settled on this too. My oven is a standard oven, not super hot, so we get enough heat through the paper from the stone before the top is done. But I do think a semi-deep cast iron pan pizza is ideal and foolproof for the home cook.
If cooking on entirely flat surface, the parchment paper method described in other comments works well, though it's precarious with larger or heavier pies, need two people to avoid having the parchment paper spill out. If cooking in a cast iron pan, I just preheat the pan in the oven, and have all the ingredients set aside and dough prepared, and when the oven is ready, pull out the pan, put pan on stove top, lightly oil, and put dough in pan, and then put toppings on it fast and insert in oven. This works for the dough recipe I use, YMMV.
Eventually develop a whole methodology around launching pizza. Use a smooth floured wooden paddle. Know how much sauce a certain dough can hold before sticking. Avoid ingredients in sizes that tend to fall off. Test motion before putting in the oven, and if its sticking know that you can reflour under it piece by piece but attempting to launch a even slightly sticking pizza will always end in disaster.
I ended up getting 2 peels. Wooden to launch, steel to remove. Also use semolina or cornmeal on the peel and as soon as the dough hits the peel the clock starts so move fast. Always have the toppings ready to go before that point.
More transfer medium than you think you should need. Experiment with the amount.
If you don't know what I mean, I'm talking about coarse-ground cornmeal or farina, the latter of which is a very coarse-ground wheat flour sometimes used to make a kind of cereal-mush kinda like oatmeal or cream-of-wheat—but it's also outstanding for this job; coarse durham-wheat can do in a pinch, but it's too fine to really be good at it, plus it tends to be expensive while farina's usually cheap (and so's cornmeal, but avoid the fine stuff, you want the coarsest you can get).
You put this on the peel before placing the stretched dough on it and adding toppings. Just spread it in a layer over the top of it. It helps keep it from sticking, which makes the transfer easier.
I've found different peels require different amounts. I had a shitty looking peel that was somewhat-rough, unfinished wood and it didn't require much. It got ruined (I'll spare you the details, but, kids) and I replaced it with a cheap but fancier-looking one I found on amazon, that's dark-stained, smooth acacia or some shit. It's awful. I need so much more medium on it to keep the pizza from sticking. I've thought about roughing it up with sandpaper, see if that helps, but haven't tried it yet—if yours is smooth-finished and you want to be a pioneer, maybe try that. First pie I tried to cook with that thing was the first I'd ruined in years. Still mad about it :-)
You probably don't need so much that you can't see any of the peel under it, though, even on one that bad. My better peel only required a light dusting, once I got my technique down.
Point is, definitely use that stuff, and experiment with the amount of that you put on. The more you have to use, the more waste and the more mess, so there's good reason to dial in what you actually need and not just pile a ton on every time, but you need some amount.
As far as technique: shake it loose over the sink (so any cornmeal or flour that falls off goes there instead of the floor or whatever) right before transferring to the oven. Just hold it level and shake horizontally, forward and back or side to side, until the whole pie's loose and moves freely. If you have spots that stick really badly, uh, try to lift it up and put more medium under it? This has never worked well for me, I've just gotten good at making sure that doesn't happen, but sometimes you can save it that way.
Then, when transferring into the oven, you need to hold it at an angle shallow enough that gravity alone will not do the work—too steep an angle, and it'll pile up when it comes off. You'll need the same sort of shaking action here, but because it's tilted a little it'll also slide off as it goes. Start with the edge of the peel way at the back of your stone, maybe just an inch or so from the back edge of it, and move it forward as the pie comes off, else your placement will suck and, in the worst case, some of it won't be on the stone.
For your specific question: For one pizza for one, I start with the dough prepared as in the posts. The dough is in a covered plastic container, about 12 ounces to leave room in cases of the dough expanding. I dump the dough on a round sheet of Teflon. The sheet just nicely fits in the bottom of a common cast iron frying pan. I got the sheet from a long roll of such Teflon from Amazon, sold for drying fruit or some such. But it's Teflon so will withstand the heat of cooking -- it should and in my experience of some years, does.
So, now the round sheet of Teflon is on my cutting board and the pizza dough has been dumped onto the Teflon. Then with fingers, I press the dough to be round and nearly covering the Teflon. As in my posts, then I add tomato sauce, Mozzarella cheese, and slices of pepperoni sausage. Right, I have found no need for electric mixers, rolling pins, cooking spray, etc. Fingers work fine.
Now for your question, how to move to the frying pan!!! I slide a spatula under the right part of the Teflon, and that serves to support about half of the sheet and the raw pizza. So, with a right hand finger on part of the Teflon to keep it on the spatula and two left hand fingers to support the left side of the Teflon, I carry the stack to the stove and the frying pan. So far, I've never dropped anything! But it would be a little safer to have the frying pan, so far just at room temperature, also on the cutting board so that the trip of the Teflon circle to the pan would be really short.
WOW! Right! Just thought of something MUCH better! Have the room temperature frying pan on the cutting board or even just the countertop, put the Teflon sheet in the frying pan, and THEN add the toppings, dough, sauce, cheese, sausage, etc. Sooo, no moving to the frying pan at all!!!! 100% no worries, no risk!!!
When the pizza is done, I slide the spatula under the Teflon and carry it and the pizza to the cutting board. At this point, the pizza crust is a little stiff and easier to carry without flopping. And, again, so far I've never had any trouble from this trip from the pan back to the cutting board and the action with a chef's knife. Since I'm no candidate for a champion of high coordination, I'm sure you can do this move just fine!
Else, put some heat resistant pad on the cutting board and move the whole frying pan to that pad and, thus, have a very short distance to move the cooked pizza to the cutting board and knife action!!!
A "heat resistant pad"? How about just a pot, about 2 quarts, cool?
Important note: when home-cooking pizza, you can easily fake the peel with a large cutting board (wooden! Plastic may melt!) only for the taking-out portion. It may require a little more manual assistance, but it does the job. It's a much worse idea for putting the pie in, though (you can probably make it work, but... I wouldn't risk it)
This is handy if you don't want to own more than one peel, but do want to be able to prep a second pizza on a peel while the first one is cooking.
I make pizza at home. If you let the dough ferment cold for at least overnight, the results are pretty darned good. I usually do a 3 day ferment in the fridge.
For amazing flavor, yes. But the biggest upside to pizza at home is that it is almost literally impossible to make a bad pizza. You can definitely do same-day dough, or even just buy dough balls from the grocery. Its hard to shortcut letting yeast work their magic.
My bread-machine dough takes 5 minutes of hand-on time and is ready in two hours. It's not as good as if you let it rest or do a fancier hand- or mixer-prep, but it absolutely will not keep your pizza from being better than any of the major chains (not that that's a high bar, but still).
You can get a nearly the same results in a couple hours if you keep a sour dough starter in your fridge and use the discard from that in your pizza dough. Add the discard to your warm water along with the yeast to warm it up.
I've done fancy dough plenty of times, but mostly just use lazy bread-machine dough these days. It's serviceable same-day—not as good as fancier preparations, but not as far off as one might think—and does also benefit from a night in the fridge, if one thinks to make it the day before. Just have to let it get back up to room temp before cooking, or it won't rise properly. Takes like five minutes of hands-on time, which is all just gathering and measuring the ingredients.
I've pretty much come to this conclusion as well, but I do still often cook the pizzas on my 12" Ooni Karu woodfired mini-oven though.. you don't get the same level of "leopard skin" / micro-bubbles, but it's mostly there.
If I have a bit more time, but still relatively lazy, I'll use the stand mixer, but proof in my oven for an hour or two, which has a proofing mode which is basically a low temperature steam oven for a nice warm humid environment.
My problem with homemade pizza was how much it costs. As someone who likes lots of toppings (pepperoni, sausage, olives, you name it), a pizza was costing me over $20 to make at home. At which point I guess I'd fail to see the point since it's now costing more and taking a lot of time.
Yeah although pickled or canned stuff like mushrooms, olives, etc. work great and you can just stockpile them in your pantry when you see them on sale. I usually make my pizzas with sausage instead of pepperoni because I find ground sausage cheaper than pepperoni. If you find stuff on sale all the core ingredients like cheese, sauce, etc. can last in your freezer for a long time.
I buy the ingredients in bulk at a warehouse store and freeze the stuff that normally goes in refrigerator to prevent spoilage. Both meat toppings and cheese would mold if I left it in the refrigerator too long.
Counterpoint: A $10 large "brooklyn" pizza from Dominos today is vastly better than any Pizza Hut or Dominos pizza ever was in the 90s. Not as good as a pizza from a halfway decent independent pizzeria, but half the price.
That's only because Dominos infamously, sometime during the 2010s(?), ran a campaign that amounted to "Our current pizza sucked, but we've got a new recipe that's better."
Yeah I occasionally get caught in the trap of trying their Brooklyn crust and every time I come to the conclusion that it's a lackluster disappointing product that isn't in any way different from any of their other pizzas in terms of quality. I've maybe had dominoes 2 times in the last 5 years which is why I keep forgetting XD
They tricked me once. I was hoping for something akin to Pizza Hut's short-lived early-'00s "Big New Yorker", which wasn't really like NY pizza but was a lot better than everything else PH was serving at the time. Nope, just as bad as their regular pizza.
What's weird is I was around for that, was in college and ate Domino's pretty regularly at the time, and everyone seems to believe it was indeed a lot better, but I thought it was a ton worse than what they had before. Just tasted like a lot more MSG and oregano.
I felt the same way. When I was in my early 20's, little caesers had $5 pizzas, so of course Dominos did $4 pizzas. One topping, large. Believe it or not, both were decent. No, nothing compared to NY slices or what have you, but good enough.
I tried Dominos after the 'realignment' and found it much worse than I remembered. But, it could be I hadn't eaten there in a few years prior...maybe it went from good, to bad, to ok in that timespan?
At the risk of sounding like an ad I’m kind of startled at how not-terrible Little Caesars is for the price. A lot of food and a completely reasonable tasting and baked pie for stupid cheap when compared to almost everything else.
Costco pizzas fill that niche for me. Ton of food for $10, somewhat better than Little Caesers, and until cost cutting measures during the pandemic, a very passable combo pizza.
Costco's pizza works out pretty damn well on a just-get-some-calories-in-me-but-don't-make-me-cook basis, too, if you want something you can carry out. Two days of calories for $10.
I don't know what it is now, but Cici used to have $1.99 all you can eat pizza buffets on certain days of the week. This would have been in the mid 90s. Unbelievably (suspiciously?) cheap even for then.
Little Caesars used to be so much better. This was the time period when they were selling you two pizzas on a paper-wrapped flat for the price of one major chain pizza.
Not sure when they switched to extreme value focus.
Even the late Anythony Bourdain could espouse on the greatness of an "objectively terrible" Wafflehouse meal.
There's a time and place for everything, and even the snobbiest of us food snobs can appreciate the time and place for the likes of Little Ceasars, Costco Pizza, Wafflehouse, et al.
I also love Waffle House's food despite, maybe even because, it's 'bad'. Their waffles are legit good; the rest is coffee shop slop of the highest order. Recommended. (Glad Bourdain had the guts to say this)
I contend Anthony Bourdain didn't actually know good food from bad. I have nothing against him, I enjoyed his show, it was quite engaging, and I wanted him to dispense good information--so I could use it--but his recommendations, for instance in the NY City area, were awful. (he prided himself on not describing the food he was trying, all he ever would say it is, "that's good".)
His career as a chef was at a brasserie serving brasserie fare which is basically like working at a French diner, not necessarily anything that's going to educate your palate.
Again, not criticizing him, I'm actually envious, I wish I could be happy eating mediocre food, my life would be much simpler.
The elevation of haute cuisine as “good” and common folk food as “mediocre” is strange to me.
Sometimes a cheap-ass $5 meal really does satisfy people far more than a Michelin star restaurant. Humble bragging about only being able to enjoy non-normie food sounds silly and unrefined, really.
I'm not referring to that. I'm referring to things like "what's the best pho" or pizza or pupusa or ramen
I do think as a chef learning haute cuisine is learning useful things about cooking and what makes some bread better than other bread, and what consistency a sauce should have and how to achieve it.
Little Ceasars is worse a in that it’s a bad pizza that gets worse over time. It sort of tastes like nothing until it cools, at which point it tastes like cardboard.
That doesn't mean he would have liked little ceasers. If anything, it really seems like you don't understand his point about the charm of waffle house.
This is how I explain my refusal to learn anything about the varieties and nuances of "good coffee". If I learned to appreciate good coffee, would I still be able to enjoy common dinner coffee? I fear not.
I'm fairly sure I have a well-above-average ability to appreciate actually-good coffee and actually-good pizza—but am also genuinely happy with the bad stuff, even though I'm entirely aware it's bad (within reason—I've had a couple gas station cups of coffee that weren't just bad, but wrong, and I wasn't able to finish them, and instant coffee usually gets a polite "no thanks" from me, but if Folger's or Kirkland Ground or whatever is what you've got, I'll be truly grateful to have it)
I'm not that way with wine and beer. I don't like bad wine or beer at all. I will turn it down or just drink it to be polite, not enjoying it a bit.
I think the difference is I never liked bad wine or beer, while I started out liking bad pizza and bad coffee before I learned what the good stuff tasted like. So, you might be safe.
[EDIT] Reflecting more on this, part of it may be that I regard bad coffee and bad pizza as pretty much totally different things from good varieties of the same—I just happen to like both. I don't really consider one a substitute for the other, I guess. Bad coffee is just coffee-flavored... but I like coffee flavor! Good coffee has all kinds of flavors going on. If you're interested in getting into that, I recommend finding a highly-regarded local roaster doing a tasting event—I personally find it much easier to get into a new flavor-related thing, such that I can start to understand it and pick out various notes, if I can do side-by-side tastings of various examples of the thing, all in a short span.
It's similar with beer and wine, I just happen not to like "beer-flavored" or "wine-flavored", the way I do like coffee-flavored coffee or find greasy bread smeared with salty cheese and tomato sauce satisfying even if it's pretty awful—get me the nice stuff that has more going on and I'm in heaven, though.
One of my favorite coffee experiences was on an Amtrak. The cup of coffee was $2. It was served on a Pepsi branded paper tray thing. Carrying it up the narrow staircase was fun. I enjoyed every sip. It tasted like cream and sugar and the coffee my grandma used to make out of a metal tin.
It's a one-way street. You can love cheap poorly brewed coffee but once you have tried better the cheap stuff becomes undrinkable. Like going from a touch tone back to a rotary dial phone. Impossible.
Until my early mid 20s I never like coffee at all. Then I tried double cream and sugar coffee, then milky cappuccinos, then massive syrupy sweet Starbucks.
After years of "acclimatizing" I thought I'd branch out. I bought a grinder, fresh coffee beans, a scale, French Press, 16:1 ratio. I went black and never went back.
Coffee made well from fresh beans freshly ground has a sweetness a caramel like after-taste. Very little bitterness (comes from brewing too long) and can surprise even those who pile on milk and sugar or even salt to mask its bitterness.
All that fancy coffee prep still doesn't give you what a good diner coffee delivers though: a warm hug after a long night, or hanging with friends, or a big family breakfast, or talking with a potential soul mate after a first date... or countless other things I associate with drinking coffee in a diner
I don’t know. I make my own espresso drink every morning with locally roasted beans, but about twice a month I got to a cheap diner for breakfast and slurp down 3 cups of their black coffee with a smile on my face.
You can enjoy anything if you try hard enough. I go to great lengths to get the best coffee and prepare it in the best way possible, but I'm still very happy to drink an imperfect cup of coffee. Some of the worst coffee I can imagine is whatever they serve on American Airlines flights. It has such a weird flavor, I'm not even sure it's actually coffee. With all of that in mind, I am looking forward to drinking the next cup of airline coffee that is offered to me ;) It's something different, even if it's different in all the wrong ways.
The trick is to learn to enjoy all coffees for what they are. I'll take gas station murk in a pinch, and I'll drink it black when no options are available. But I also love coffees that are $10-15 per pound. But I usually buy in the $7 range. It's about being content, not being snobby, no matter how much you spend.
Edit: Agreeing with another commenter in this thread that some coffees at gas stations are truly awful and are immediately thrown away. Those aren't legit coffee though, and don't count toward what I said above.
This might be wise advice. I have spent a lot on gear, and I buy bags that are typically around $30/lb, although there are some great blends that can be picked up for around $15/lb.
It has ruined the cheap (Robusta) coffee for me. There are diners that make a great medium roast cup and use Arabica beans.
But the good coffee sure is good, and it’s fun to get familiar with the varieties.
I'd never defend Little Caesar's as amazing pizza but it does exactly what it's supposed to, i.e. hits the spot when you're looking for primal satisfaction of a craving for a greasy pile of dough and cheese. When I want "real" pizza I walk down the street for something Neapolitan or NY-style but if I'm hanging with a large group of friends and feel like pigging out then I see nothing wrong with going all-in for some Deep Deep Dish from LC.
Seconded, cannot relate. They're worth the $6 or whatever but not a penny more. Better than most $6 frozen pizzas, I suppose. They have that going for them.
They're also a good example of this, actually. They'd held their $5 price point for a long time but had gradually been cutting toppings until they were comically bare. Then they introduced a $6 "extra toppings" (or something, I don't recall the way they phrased it) pie that just had the same amount the normal ones used to.
Post-Covid I'm pretty sure the sad-pie price is up to $6, and the actually-has-toppings edition is $7.
In my metro area they increased prices to $7. However, quality has drastically improved. If you haven't tried em recently they are very different than the old thin, taste like nothing, Little Caesars pizzas.
Are they using real cheese nowadays (even bulk processed cheese)? If so, perhaps they have improved. The last time I had one (which was admittedly a long time ago) they were using some kind of "imitation cheese-flavored product" or something along those lines.
I'm bistellar: I love both Star Wars and Star Trek.
But I fully realize that Bladerunner is astronomically better than either of them.
And none of those masterpiees keep me from fully enjoying smutty trash like Space Truckers, or even any of Philip K Dick's horrible random short stories.
The big national brands did a big stealth price hike a few years ago when they took away free delivery. So that $15 pie is now about $25 or $26 by the time you add fees, taxes, and tip.
Checking through old emails from Papa Johns (Garbage pizza, but sometimes you WANT garbage pizza.)
I know it was free delivery at somepoint, but it's hard to pinpoint as prior to 2010 their emails didn't include a broken out receipt, just a total.
But, in 2010 it was $1.99 then soon after went up to $2.50.
In 2019 that was bumped to $2.75.
No orders between late 2019 and early 2022.
Early 2022 it was $4.49, then shortly after $4.79, then bumped to $4.99 in July, where it is as of my last order a few days ago.
Agreed. A good pizza is $20 retail, $8-12 at home.
I think the pizza problem is two-fold. Like Jewish Delis, ethnic Italians are exiting the business and selling the local shops. Instead of working 60 hours a week in the shop, the kids are mortgage brokers and IT guys.
The other issue is that manufactured pizza components are better and cheaper. You can be a lower skill operator and still churn out a mediocre product. So a shitty local shop is using a similar premade dough and mediocre cheese that a chain is using.
> Like Jewish Delis, ethnic Italians are exiting the business and selling the local shops.
that was the problem a generation ago. The new problem is that very few customers now know what good pizza should/could taste like, they're not very "Italian" any more either.
The shrinkflation thing is getting out of hand. Not pizza, but I like those Kaukauna brand almond covered cheese balls. They replaced the 10 ounce product with a 6 ounce one, and then charge 10% more for the smaller ball.
Too bad Liam didn't track the average weight of the slices. I have a hunch that might have tracked down as well.
> That mouth-watering Pizza Hut pie you remember from 1992 isn't all nostalgia—every now and then I find single-location or small-chain joints that make pizza very similar to how I remember those tasting.
100% their pizza has changed from the 90's. There is a single location in Gettysburg that I ate at twice and LOVE it - Tommys Pizza on Steinwehr Ave. They even have the textured red plastic soda "glasses" that Pizza Hut used. Solid old school Pizza Hut.
> The biggest thing I have noticed is the decline in the amount of sauce put on slices. I’m sure this is a cost-saving measure, but the overall quality of your average slice in the city has definitely suffered.
Isn't cheese more expensive than tomato sauce? Why would the restaurants skimp on a cheaper ingredient (tomatoes) instead of more expensive (cheese)?
this is not a direct answer to your question, but cheese quality varies more than tomato quality, and NYC pizza in the inexpensive tier already switched to it's-not-really-cheese a few decades ago, so there is little room for saving except by withholding. Possibly customers want the very visible cheese-like product more than they want the sauce so scrimping on the cheese would turn more customers away?
This is true of the big national chains, too. They've kept prices relatively stable for damn near 25 years, at this point, but quality has gotten far worse over that same time span. That mouth-watering Pizza Hut pie you remember from 1992 isn't all nostalgia—every now and then I find single-location or small-chain joints that make pizza very similar to how I remember those tasting. Thing is, those are like $15+ a pie now, with a coupon or special. But you can still get larges for $8 or less (coupon or special, which are available 100% of the time) at the major chains—they're just not the same pizza you were getting in the 80s up to about the late 90s.
[EDIT] In fact, the 2020-on inflation is the first time I've seen the big chains seriously give in on keeping price increases in check. They've gone up like 20% in the last couple years.