The Dough
For this pizza we found Kroger Homestyle Ready to Bake Pizza Crust (13.8oz) on sale for $1.25, that’s $1.34 saved in my pocket. Generally, the rule at our house is if it isn’t healthy it has to be on sale or have a coupon to justify the purchase. The sale resulted in us taking unhealthy pizza dough home. When I was a kid we would make pizza with Pillsbury pizza dough a couple of times a month, however I had never tried the Kroger brand.
We have to pause to ask ourselves, is this really cheaper than homemade dough? Let’s assume we are fresh off the plane, college students heading toward our parent’s cabin in the mountains and we have kitchen utensils there, but we don’t keep any food there. We just spent most of our budget on the plane ticket so we want to make our food budget last the duration.
As we look at the cost we are selecting the cheapest prices, regardless of the quality. Pulling out the Kroger app and looking up flour, I see I can get 5lbs of flour for $1.59. Well that is already more than the $1.25 but we aren’t using all 5lbs. I hope. That would be a hefty pizza.
In addition to the flour, for homemade dough we also need yeast (3pks for $1.19), oil (olive: 17floz $2.99, vegetable: 32floz $1.69), sugar (4lb for $1.99 or 1 packet from your chosen restaurant or pick one up in the airport), and water (priceless). The estimated total for whole ingredients is $4.77.
Next we have to ask ourselves how many pizza doughs could we make with these ingredients. A quick search reveals that 3.33 cups of flour are about 1 pound. However, the serving size on the 5lb package (1/4 cup x 75 servings) indicates we can make 4.69 pizzas, or 4 because we are looking at whole pizzas. This means we can get 4 pizzas out of one parcel of flour (assuming 4 cups per pizza). Assuming 4 pizzas, each pizza’s dough would cost $1.19. Compared to our on sale dough at $1.25, based on unit cost it is cheaper to make homemade dough.
Wait just a minute. It isn’t that simple. We don’t have enough yeast to make 4 pizzas. Assuming we buy ingredients to cover 3 pizzas (for the 3 pkts of yeast) then our cost per pizza dough will be $1.59. This brings the cost over the sale price dough, but not over the original price. It is most likely that we do not come across on sale dough in our quick run to the local grocery.
To make 4 pizza doughs our cost would come to $1.42, making each pizza cheaper. In this case, it is worth buying another 3pkt of yeast for another pizza dough.
The Sauce and Toppings
It’s all great to have the dough, but we still need sauce, cheese and maybe some other toppings to call it a pizza. In this scenario, the college students are going to buy the cheapest jar of sauce they find, which happens to be a $1.00 Hunt’s garlic tomato sauce. Although thin and acidic, it is still sauce. The cheese will need to be shredded, but the cost of the 32oz block vs the 32oz shredded mozzarella are equivalent at $6.99. I found that pleasantly surprising. That only gives us 1.33 cups of cheese for the 3 pizzas, but it is doable. Our cheese pizza total now comes to $12.46 or $4.15/pizza. Any other toppings would depend on what is left in the budget and whether everyone can agree on one topping. Kroger has a package of pepperoni for $2.50.
Our Budget Pizza
Back to the on sale dough for $1.25. Since we are not college students anymore we are able to make Budget+ pizza and home-make our sauce. We made enough sauce for 3 pizzas (look forward to Pizza #3!) so we will cut the cost by a third.
Homemade sauce: San Marzano peeled tomatoes 28oz – $3.99, Kroger tomato paste – $0.49 (or $0.89 for Hunt’s), 2+ garlic cloves – $0.50 (for the whole head), fresh basil – $1.99 or dried – $1.59, or other spices such as oregano. We blended the ingredients in a food processor. This brings our sauce to $2.19 for 1 of 3 pizzas. More than double the cheapest Hunt’s sauce. By the way, 1 jar of Kroger pizza sauce is $1.29.
Homemade sauce does not cut the bill, and it is definitely cheaper to buy the sauce.
For the cheese I found a bag of shredded Mexican Style Kroger cheese in the fridge, which is listed at $2.29. We then added salami which was a gift and free to us.
Budget+ pizza consists of purchased packaged dough, homemade sauce, and purchased shredded cheese. We estimate that it cost us $6.39 to make 1 Budget+ pizza. Considering we owned the flour, spices, cheese, etc. this total includes only the portion of the total ingredients we estimated we used.
Scoring: 4.9 of 10. It does not deserve to be in the top half of pizzas I have eaten. Considering the flavor, it was alright; hard to say anything bad about it but it didn’t wow either. The crust tasted like the tube it was raised in and it did not have any substance behind it. Between the two of us, we ate the entire pan pizza in 1 sitting, comparatively (sneak peek) it took us 3 meals to eat Pizza #3. It was not as filling and I think that is due to the dough. The sauce did not have as strong a garlic flavor when cooked on the pizza as it was on some meatballs I had for another meal.
Food of the Month 