Americans Love Ordering Pizza on Facebook
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
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...
Unless you have a wood oven, you need to find better pizzarias to order from
I don't really get delivery food in general, would much rather just walk to the restaurant.
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.
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!
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!
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...
Naan breads are great for "personal sized" pizzas, especially the garlic Naan breads!
But could obviously work faster with a good oven, mine came with the flat.
You don't have to go to this extreme, but it gives you an idea: http://www.bakingsteel.com/blog/72-hour-pizza-dough
I'd also say that a short rise dough recipe barely has any flavor from the yeast. Sitting in the fridge adds flavor.
But yeah, if I had better planning and time management I would let it rise :)
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 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.
> Not only do a save a lot of money
So, it's not cheaper.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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"
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.
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.
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
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.
Those are something like some local high school kids who work mostly for tips and a telephone.
Now, paying by human exchange is being trumped by the finger only