There are a few ways to make a pizza, but unfortunately many places create their pizzas to fit a low price model ie; $5. When a place is tied to a low price model, they then need to source ingredients that can sustain that price model.
Typically for the industry, food cost is 30% of the pizza, so for a $5 pizza that’s $1.50 to create that ‘zza, including the box. We talk a lot about ingredients when we do our pizza making class and everyone agrees that despite all the marketing they’ve seen, you really can’t make a top quality, gourmet pizza for $1.50, even at home when your labour is free.
What Makes Diana’s Pizza so Different?
This is a great question. For the simplest answer we can begin by comparing our pizza to almost every other pizza out there. Our pizza is better because we start with only top quality ingredients, and while many places repeat the quality mantra, we begin creating our superior, gourmet pizza from the crust up. Our crusts are only made with olive oil while other places use canola or vegetable oil and even lard. Olive oil is healthier and when you use it in pizza dough it gives the crust a great bread flavour. We also only use an organic sea salt in our dough and in our sauce while other places use table salt. Sea salt is a more natural salt, while table salt is sodium chloride, something many doctors and nurses tell us to cut down on. The organic sea salt we use is 90 times more expensive than cheap table salt, but we feel you’re worth it. But the best way to answer this question is to study the ingredients that are used to make a pizza.
Diana’s Definition of Gourmet Pizza:
Healthy food made with the best ingredients; low fat 100% dairy cheeses, lean meats, fresh veggies, sauce made from ripe red tomatoes grown in the sun belt, whole wheat crusts, white crusts made with premium unbleached flour. Most are made with enriched flour & canola oil. Some are made of lard. We could buy an 18 gallon jug of canola for the same price we pay for a 3 litre jug of Olive oil, but I recommend Olive oil because it’s more beneficial than canola or vegetable oils and it adds that great bread flavour.
Guaranteed Quality Spices vs. cheap spices:
Many spices are grown in 3rd world countries where access to clean water and education about proper food handling are serious issues. Villagers typically get paid by the pound so sticks, stones and other foreign matter that I don’t want to completely gross you out, but the truth it’s not just a big difference in prices on guaranteed quality spices versus cheap ones. There’s also a big difference in the amount of spice per gram. Choose a brand / company that work with villagers to insure maximum quality & pureness. When you use the best quality spices, recipes requires less quantity to create great and satisfying flavours. Plus you can be certain that your recipes will always turn out as intended, every time. We only purchase the best quality of spices at Diana’s Gourmet Pizzeria, yet the cost is only 1% of the total cost of the recipes. Most of the flavour is provided by the least expensive price per serving. When you buy the best spices, less is truly more.
More on this next post....
Master Pizza Chef Diana Cline's Blog
