Sorry for the tangent but...

About a year ago I started making my own pizza instead of ordering it in. Not only do a save a lot of money but it is a higher quality product.

It takes about a half hour of prep so I only do it on weekends. I found a quick crust recipe that doesn't require waiting for hours for the dough to rise [1]. The ingredients are just bread flour, yeast, water, salt, olive oil, and sugar.

The toppings and sauce are the most expensive parts. Though I'm sure if I made the sauce from scratch I could shave a dollar but probably not worth the effort.

Tip: buying a jar of yeast is MUCH cheaper than the pre-measured packets that only make one pizza. Those are a rip off. A jar is almost the same price and makes 15 pizzas instead of 1.

[1] http://allrecipes.com/recipe/20171/quick-and-easy-pizza-crus...

For anyone reading this and interested in making their own pizzas, pizzamaking.com is an amazing resource for making pizza at home. Great pizza is all about the temperature it cooks at, and most home ovens can't reach the needed temp of 600F+ for NY style and 900F+ for Neapolitan style pizza. The Blackstone pizza oven is highly recommended, and for for less than $300, it reaches temps of 800F+ and churns out amazing pizzas at home in less than 5 mins of cooking time.

You don't necessarily need an oven, a pizza stone works to make a Neapolitan style pizza. You have to heat it for an hour at max temperature. After that, the pizza will be done within 3-4 minutes and have the same consistency as from a high temperature oven.

Are you sure it takes an hour for the stone to reach temperature? You need the entire thing to be as hot as the oven can make it, but does that really take that long? Heating it any longer doesn't make a difference other than increase your electricity bill.

It seems to take that long. I only did it for 30 min in the beginning and the last pizzas turned out much better than the first. Since I had it in for an hour I get consistent results from the start. The stone is quite heavy so I can imagine that it takes a bit to have the whole stone on temperature.

But could obviously work faster with a good oven, mine came with the flat.

Interesting, thanks for your measurement points! I rarely make pizza at home so I don't have a stone but I've been meaning to get one. Since they (hopefully) have high thermal conductivity it should be fairly easy to measure with an IR thermometer.

While extra high temperatures and/or fancy ovens will certainly make a better pizza, it's not a requirement for making great pizza at home, even when using raw pizza dough (store bought or home made) and throwing it yourself.

The better your crust, the better the pizza, but heck, even using pre-made Boboli pizza crust can yield a good tasting home-made pizza.

Although, I'd certainly recommend getting some dough from your local grocery store and throwing it yourself... it's a skill that's surprisingly satisfying to learn and to get good at, plus it makes the entire experience a ton more fun and enjoyable (and it'll impress guests as well)!

Pizza is very easy to make, and can be a lot of fun!

Some of the other flatbreads/Naan breads available in many supermarkets work well also. I tend do thin/crispy crusts anyway so these plus a pizza stone work pretty well for me. Working with pizza dough was always the "step too far" for making my own pizza but now I find it's pretty straightforward.

> Some of the other flatbreads/Naan breads available in many supermarkets work well also

Naan breads are great for "personal sized" pizzas, especially the garlic Naan breads!

I'd also say you can mitigate some of the temperature differential by making sure you have a pre-heated surface in the oven. An upturned (perforated or not) baking sheet in an as-hot-as-it-can-go oven for an hour or so makes a decently hot base for the crust.

You can also make a great pizza in a cast iron skillet. It will hold a lot more heat than a baking sheet and gets your dough pretty crispy.

> An upturned (perforated or not) baking sheet in an as-hot-as-it-can-go

Or a pizza stone if you have one (they're fairly inexpensive usually).

But a pizza stone is a single-tasker kitchen gadget (thanks Alton), where-as the baking sheet is a multi-tasker with more utility.

Both will do wonders for getting a more crispy crust!

Pizza stones aren't just for cooking pizzas on. They help you maintain your oven temperature[1].

Also, IIRC, Alton Brown does use a pizza stone, but he recommends buying unglazed ceramic floor tiles as an alternative.

[1]https://www.cookingforgeeks.com/blog/posts/the-two-things-yo...

I buy pizza, but make mostly make my own. Try making your dough a day or two ahead of time and put it in the fridge until you need it. It will taste better, less yeasty as quick breads tend to be. It also means you can throw some together at whatever hour suits you and have it ready to go for another day. I've tried it with many dough recipes and they always turn out better.

You don't have to go to this extreme, but it gives you an idea: http://www.bakingsteel.com/blog/72-hour-pizza-dough

In the American vernacular, "quick bread" is a bread made with some leavening other than yeast.

I'd also say that a short rise dough recipe barely has any flavor from the yeast. Sitting in the fridge adds flavor.

It's a trade off for my poor planning. The recipe I put actually comes out well, still better than fast food pizza and pretty close to the mom & pop pizza places.

But yeah, if I had better planning and time management I would let it rise :)

Even if you just buy a pizza base and then add the toppings yourself you end up with a better pizza than take out.

I'd rather experiment with the toppings rather than the pizza dough making. This works even better with my 4yo daughter.

I find that there's very little extra time spent putting the toppings on and cooking vs ordering, waiting and collecting from the door.

This can then be done any night of the week.

I'd like to also mention that making your own mozzarella is incredibly easy and worthwhile [0]. I started making my own cheese of all kinds recently, which has been a thoroughly worthwhile time and money investment. But especially when my wife wants to make her cauliflower pizza, I make a big batch of this mozzarella for toppings. This Australian guy Gavin Webber has tons of great instructional videos on Youtube.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VbuBcNCgAc

How much does it cost you to make a single pie? How big is it?

I also make my own pizza and it is very tasty; however, I find it incredibly difficult to beat the $6.99 2-topping medium pizza deal for pick-up.

About $4 +/- $2 depending on what toping I use (meat costs more).

14 inches. Probably enough to make the equivalent of 2 mediums.

Pizza is more expensive here though. I can't get 2 mediums for that price.

Making pizza, especially if you have a wood fired oven, is a lot of fun I find. I usually make pizzas for 10-15 people who we invite over and when the fire dies down, I bake bread. Much nicer (and cheaper) than ordering. There are ofcourse (enough) pizza places who can beat it on quality, but not when ordering in imho.

I may be wrong -- and I don't mind working dough, myself.

But I seem to recall from helping my parents (well, mother) with their bread maker, that there is a pizza dough mode.

I gather this would prepare the dough, without (obviously) baking it.

Yup, this.

I started making my own pizzas because my ex was celiac's and I was lactose intolerant, which is a recipe for garbage pizzas when you go out.

Bought Trader Joe's cauliflower crust and started making my own pizzas. Delicious.

I happen to have recently turned 160kg of flour, 100kg of tomato sauce, 70kg of mozzarella cheese and 160kg of various toppings into pizza over the span of five days (with many helping hands) at a Dutch hacker camp, SHA2017. See https://twitter.com/pizzahackery for some nice pictures etc. We had a used 14.4kw (yup, 14,400W) electric oven. Some of our observations:

- Letting dough rest really makes a difference. I know, it requires planning etc and I'm impatient and I don't really do it at home either. The best batches we had had risen for 30min outside and then ~20h in the fridge (or in our case, a cooling truck). Even more time would likely help, two to three days seems to be the agreed-upon number, but we didn't have the storage capacity for that. You also don't need a whole lot of yeast when doing that, we used various amounts but 75g dried yeast was plenty for 10kg of flour with a slow rise.

- Quality flour makes a difference, too. We tried several from the cheapest supermarket flour (32ct/kg) to some really nice organic stoneground flour (~1.3€/kg) and the latter is nicer to knead and makes for a better crust. I was sceptical, too (flour is flour, right?), but it really does make a difference if you're going for maximum yummies.

- Oven temperature is important. Whatever your oven's max temperature is, go for that (unless it's a pottery oven), and use a pizza stone or something (and let it heat up for a while), it adds thermal capacity, i.e. the oven won't cool down as much when you put in the pizza. We bought a used pizza oven (picture: https://twitter.com/leonhandreke/status/893173017722982400) that reaches 500°C (930°F), which is pretty impossible at home, but that allowed us to scale the whole thing. At that temperature, pizza takes around 4 minutes to cook (on a screen, less if you put it on the stones directly, but that's a logistical nightmare with 60x80 cm pizzas) and it's perfect. You get the nice browning of the crust without burning the cheese, and the base isn't soggy.

- Sauce is cheap, cheese isn't. For the sauce, either use polpa fine (quite nice) or passata / sieved tomatoes thickened with some tomato paste. Add oregano and basil.

- We didn't have the time and skill to throw the pizza, we rolled it out. Our trays are 60x80 cm so throwing would have been very different. It was still very nice. Maybe throwing would have taken it up another notch, but it wasn't possible for us.

It was an amazing project and people loved it. We gave it away as free pizza with a donations box and the sum of donations exceeded our expectations. We're donating the entire surplus to the EFF, we still have to return some equipment (outstanding deposits), but it's going to be a sizeable amount. A+ experience, would make pizza for hackers again. Maybe I should write an account of the whole operation and post it :)

Please do so!

I think your underselling how cheap yeast is when you forgo the 'convenience tax'. I get WAY more than 15 pizzas worth of risen dough from a ~5 dollar jar.

15 is my estimate. It could be more, I never counted. I just know one jar lasts me over three months and I make an average of one pizza a week.

Don't you need a dough mixer as the amount of kneeding necessary to get the right consistency is a hassle?

I only knead the dough a few times so that it comes together and form it into a ball. I then leave it overnight in the fridge. There's a lot of mythos around 'developing the gluten' and whatnot, but I think some people just repeat it without performing actual tests to see what matters. The NY Times no-knead bread recipe is where I first learned about this.

> It takes about a half hour of prep so I only do it on weekends.

> Not only do a save a lot of money

So, it's not cheaper.

Outside of work there aren't many things I do that are "worth the money". Is it worth the money to bake pizza? Not if you compare the cost of a chain pizza vs what I make on average when I'm working.

I do so many things at home that are not "worth my time", but if I could trade doing them for more hours sitting at my desk would I do it? No! I spend enough time working. Some people enjoy cooking, gardening, yard work, etc. There are days that pulling weeds is a nice break from sitting at a desk. I'd never want to work every waking hour at my job so someone can cook, clean and take care of my house for me. Some things I do - are they worth the money? Not a chance. Worth my time? That all depends on how you'd rather spend your time.

Well, presumably most of us are not getting paid by the hour to work on weekends. So no, you are not giving up a paid hour of consulting to make the pizza.

1. Your discounting that some people (myself included) enjoy cooking so it is a liesure activity.

2. The whole "my time is worth X at work so it is worth paying X to not spend time doing something myself" is a fallacy. That only applies if there is opportunity cost involved.

3. Unless you pay even more for delivery or the pizza place is right next door, it will take you 15+ minutes to drive there, pick up the pizza, and come back.

> About a year ago I started making my own pizza instead of ordering it in. Not only do a save a lot of money but it is a higher quality product.

Unless you have a wood oven, you need to find better pizzarias to order from

I can beat all but the really good "fast food"-style pizza (the kind people stop to pick up a stack of pies to take home on their way through town) with my lesser dough recipe (uses a bread machine) and mid-tier ingredients, with a 550F oven and a stone. Yeah, you can't get the char and crust consistency of an 800F+ oven, but you can get closer than you might think for 1/3 the price of a typical wood/coal oven place, and even corner-cutting time-saving approaches will (easily) produce better food than you'd get from all but the best fast food pizza places.

Don't discourage people from cooking their own pizza. Even without special equipment you can cook some yummy stuff in the $4-$7/pie price range.

Beating delivery/take-out at home isn't really unreasonable, unless you live on top of the pizzeria or something. It loses a lot in the box, with a baking steel preheated under the broiler, your homemade and immediately eaten pie will probably be better. But yeah, you're not going to best Paulie Gee's or whatever with your home oven that tops out at 550°F.

I don't really get delivery food in general, would much rather just walk to the restaurant.

I eat out a lot because I do a lot of business travel. I don't get food delivery at home because I don't really have any options I like. But I do pickup takeout sometimes. It can just be nice to relax at home rather than eating at a restaurant.

"The company began accepting orders on Facebook in June, and the feature was an instant hit: Hundreds of orders flowed in during the first few hours. In all forms, digital orders now make up over 60 percent of Papa John’s sales."

So what percent are from facebook? Online orders are 60%, but what percent are from FB? I doubt there are that many.

My closest pizza place wasn't Papa John's, but I ordered online 100% of the time - but I'd never do it through FB.

Yes. I prefer to order online mostly because it minimizes the chance of a mistake. Speech isn't the most accurate form of communication. But, I've never ordered from facebook.

Seems like a fairly non-sequitur paragraph to me. Hundreds within the first few hours could mean 210 pizzas in 5 hours because of novelty factor, then tailing off.

Is it a national chain? Or does your local independent pizza joint have online

I've since moved, so I don't have any chains near me, but it was Domino's. I never had a mistake and except for one time, it was always ready on time. I'd go pick it up based on when they told me it would be done - just walk in and walk out with pizza.

My local pizza place in the same area (better, pizza, but twice the price) could lookup my last order by phone number - that saved time and mistakes. It was nice, but would have been better if it tied into caller ID. Some employees acted like it was a burden to have me tell them a phone # and hit the reorder button - but it was so much faster and error free.

I'm somewhat surprised that national pizza chains in the US haven't done more with their existing driver networks and delivery tech.

Edit: A little more detail...

For their current use of the networks, the apps aren't at all competitive with Uber Eats, Doordash, etc. See http://blog.pizzahut.com/featured/track-your-pizza-with-our-... , for example. It tracks only 3 states. The UI also doesn't do a good job of highlighting state changes...the current state is just a slightly larger circle, of the same color, and no "ping" when it changes.

Then, it seems like they could leverage their networks to do something beyond just delivering their own products. I get that there are potential issues with that, but it's surprising that we've not seen at least some local trial run of that.

There isn't anything special about Pizza delivery that makes it cheaper to do than UberEats or Instacart. The only difference is the margins. Pizza companies can make a $15 pizza for ~$3, and that means they don't lose money even if they spend up to $12 delivering it.

Instacart, on the other hand, likely doesn't have any margins to play with at all, considering the fact that they are paying people to shop and check out at grocery stores. And the stores already have low margins (~1%) which means they likely don't have much in the way of sweetheart deals with the stores. They are likely in the red before the goods even leave the store.

Some restaurant foods might come close to breaking even, but few restaurants approach the margins of pizza-making at high volumes.

But don't worry. There isn't any indication that VC's have figured out math yet, so we aren't in any danger of these services going away.

It not arguing that their model is cheaper. Just that they have an established process and tech that could be used for other things. Passenger airlines, for example, sell cargo services. (Yes, I get that's not the best comparison as "excess capacity" is less clear)

> For their current use of the networks, the apps aren't at all competitive with Uber Eats, Doordash, etc, for example. It tracks only 3 states. The UI also doesn't do a good job of highlighting state changes...the current state is just a slightly larger circle, of the same color, and no "ping" when it changes.

I guess I'm getting old or something, because I don't understand why you would need anything more detailed than "order received", "order on it's way", and maybe "order delivered" (although you should assumably be aware of this event without an app or website informing you).

If you have the time to watch second-by-second updates of where your food delivery is, why didn't you just go save the $5 delivery fee + tip and pick it up yourself? When I order delivery, it's because I'm doing something that needs my attention and I don't have time to cook or pickup...

It's for a similar reason, lets assume you are working on a 30~ minute task and you order food that will also arrive in 30 minutes.

For the next 20 minutes you work extremely hard and finish your task, and you are now suddenly EXTREMELY hungry. Your brain being a normal brain makes the logical jump "my task took 30 minutes, food must be here soon" checking your position re-assures your brain that you just worked quickly.

There are other reasons [ie: I have a 10 minute task, check to see if that can be finished before delivery] but I agree they don't add anything

I did mention more beyond the 3 states. The missing ping is an issue, for example..say you're in the backyard. And the subtle visual treatment of "current state".

Also, the additional info has been occasionally useful to me. Like when a driver gets obviously lost. Or "Oh, the food is cold because this place is just too far away from me for reasonable delivery"

> Or "Oh, the food is cold because this place is just too far away from me for reasonable delivery"

I live in the mountains but GPS knows where I am; drivers (parcels/food/etc) can choose upfront if 'this place is just too far away', not after they did the drive.

Uber eats has this problem. Many restaurants are too far away, but they will deliver anyway. The food quality suffers.

With the map, I know why. So, for example, I don't short tip the driver. Unfortunately, with Uber Eats, I don't see the problem until after I pay.

Change management at established organizations is hard. When franchises are involved I'm sure it's exponentially harder.

With most things, HN overestimates the ability of most organizations to overcome inertia. FB, AMZN, GOOG, etc are anomalies when it comes to managing change at large organizations.

>existing "driver networks" and "delivery tech"?

Those are something like some local high school kids who work mostly for tips and a telephone.

Is it still the case in America? In Germany and UK pizza 'boys' tend to be middle aged immigrants.

I feel lucky to live in a city where there are so many good pizza places that I've completely forgotten that chains like pizza hut exist at all.

When looking into the decline of automats (Amazon's recent announcement is automat like), one was the fact that vending machines did not have a bill acceptors. Inflation meant more coins was a hassle...

Now, paying by human exchange is being trumped by the finger only