I’m trying to be more aware of the costs of our meals lately so I can share my cheapest meals with you in a series of posts and the first thing I thought of was homemade pizza.
I work this out to be around 50p a portion for a plan pizza and that’s based on one batch of dough making two pizzas. We serve ours with sweet potato fries but you could just serve it with whatever you have in – salad, veggies, normal potatoes or even just on it’s own depending how hungry your family can get.
For the homemade pizza base (makes 2 small or one large pizza):
500g strong white bread flour (33p)
7g fast acting yeast (7p)
1tsp salt
1tsp sugar
300ml warm water
- Mix the dry ingredients together and then add the warm water.
- Give it a good stir and then you need to get your hands in and form it into a dough.
- Turn it out onto a floured surface and knead for about five minutes.
- Roll out into whatever shape you want and to whatever thickness – I like thin and crispy but everyone else likes theirs to be more deep pan.
For the tomato sauce base:
I tend to use my own homemade tomato sauce here as I’ll usually have some in the freezer but if I don’t, this is what I do….
1/3 tube tomato puree (15p)
Optional: You could mix in a couple of tablespoons of tomato ketchup to sweeten the tomato puree a little which is what I used to do when the kids were younger. Now I just use a very thin layer of tomato puree if I don’t have any homemade tomato sauce in.
For the cheese topping:
I cheat here and buy ready grated mozzarella because (a) this is one area where convenience outweighs the cost for me and (b) when you buy it on offer the price difference isn’t much at all. It’s often on offer in Tesco and Asda for two bags for three pound and the shelf life is reasonably good so I buy the two bags. It works out to £1.50 for 250g of grated mozzarella and that one bag is enough to do multiple pizzas. Miss Frugal and I will have hardly any cheese on ours so our cheese cost would be about 30p each when making a large pizza each. Most people would have more though so I’ll calculate around 45p for the cheese for something like an 80g portion – that’s more than enough.
This all means that you can make your own plain margherita pizza for about £1 – much cheaper and much less greasy than the ones you can buy in a takeaway for 3-4 times the price. When we’re all having homemade pizza, I’ll make two lots of dough to do us all.
I like mine with chicken, pepperoni and green peppers on which no-one else does. I usually make it as a small pizza and Miss Frugal will use the other half of one lot of the dough to make a plain pizza.
Mr and Master Frugal generally make one big one between them and are pretty boring as they stick to just cheese and pepperoni as the topping!
Sweet potato fries are great to go with homemade pizza as well as a salad which I’ll make if I have the things in the house to make one. Even just some lettuce and cucumber will go down well with this.
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