October is National Pizza Month, and it’s right around the corner, giving people the perfect reason to order carryout pizza.
Halloween is the busiest day of the year for pizza takeout or delivery, according to The American Pizza Community, a conglomerate of pizzerias, both large and small, across the United States.
So in preparation for pizza’s biggest day and month, this handy guide contains our best advice for ensuring your pizza takeout food exceeds your expectations.
1. Choose the Best Crust
The crust is the pizza’s foundation, beginning with a well-made dough. Properly prepared dough needs enough room to rise and rest to get the airy and light qualities that make a crust crisp on the outside and chewy on the inside.
A crust that still has heavy dough on the inside has yet to be proofed long enough and given enough time to rise. If there is still dough, it has also yet to be cooked long enough.
You can tell if your crust has been prepped correctly by looking at the border of the pizza slice from the side. If it has air holes through the most risen part of the dough, then it’s been adequately proofed.
As for cooking, the bottom of the slice should not be soggy but crisp and have a nice crunch when bitten.
Opinions on how foldable the slice is will vary and have often started many debates. We’ll leave that choice up to pizza connoisseurs.
2. How About That Sauce?
Pizzerias that mix their own sauces every day will obviously win the freshness race against those that bring in sauces from vendors or chain suppliers. Pizzas with fresh sauce are just tastier, and that’s an opinion that’s difficult to dispute.
A good way to check if your favorite pizzeria’s sauce is of high quality is to order extra on the side. You can dip your crust in it to check or have extra for any sides you may order, like garlic bread or garlic bread with cheese.
Some hints to look for the best sauce:
- 🍅 Bright red color—the fresher the tomato sauce, the brighter the red appears.
- 🥫 Consistency of color—darker or mottled sauce means it’s already been cooked and was baked again. Any pizzeria worth its weight in dough will not use pre-cooked sauce. They’ll make their own to cook on the pizza one time.
- 🍃 Flavor—Fresh pizza sauce should have savory, bright notes rather than overly sweet or dull. While some proprietary recipes may hint at sweetness as a preference, overly sweet sauce indicates they’re using tomatoes past their prime. Not so appetizing.
3. All Things Toppings
Pizza Ingredients Are the Ultimate Key
Fresh ingredients are a key part of great pizzas, no matter what toppings you choose.
The best pizzerias will use whole, fresh vegetables sourced as locally as they can get and chop them in-house.
In urban centers, that’s sometimes more difficult to achieve than pizza places with participating locations in suburbs or more rural areas, which are closer to local farmsteads or cropshares.
How can you tell if your favorite pizza restaurant’s participating locations are using the freshest ingredients? By how vibrant they appear on your pizza even after it’s been in the oven.
Toppings like mushrooms will still have some color and bite to them even after being cooked if they’re fresh. Those that come from a can are already mushy before they even go on the pizza.
Toppings like spinach or basil will still be bright green; meats will be vivid and hold their shape; cheese will be melty and slightly golden with a stretch when the slice is pulled away from the pie.
Cheese and Balance
Speaking of cheese, it’s one of the most important toppings and one of the easiest to love.
First, we look at how well melted it may (or may not) be. Perfect cheese should show no individual shreds across the entire pizza. Additionally, there should be golden spots here and there to show the cheese is melted through.
What there should not be, however, is heavily browned or charred cheese anywhere on the pizza. Charring can upset the flavor balance as well as the pizza’s texture.
Now, let’s talk quantity. While it might be tempting to load your pizzas up with enough cheese to require a fork to eat it, there are better ideas than this. More does not always equal better.
Too much cheese will overpower other flavors and toppings. Cheese is physically heavy when melted and will make it difficult to pick up your slice to eat. We weren’t kidding about the fork.
The Grease Monster
It’s a travesty when pizzas arrive with pools of orange grease. What’s even more tragic is when people think this is normal, or worse, a good pizza.
Greasy pools on your pizza indicate the ratio of tomato and mozzarella is off balance. Grease will form when this ingredient imbalance is present, and it’s not a good look or taste. It means the restaurant where your pizza originated needs to be better-versed in pizza-making.
4. The Distance From Participating Locations
When you’re about to order takeout or delivery, search “pizza take out near me,” or “pizza carryout near me,” instead of taking chances with an order at a place that’s too far away. The reason is delivery time.
The restaurant you order from could make the best pizzas in the world and be hiring the best drivers for delivery, but it will only matter if they can deliver them before the pizza goes cold.
Technology is beautiful now, and many pizzerias have invested in insulated bags to keep pizzas warm during delivery. These are great, but they can only do so much. They’re not much better than those hot rotation stations pizza chains used in malls in the 90s to keep pizza hot and ready to serve.
While packaging has improved, it’s still wise to search “takeout pizza restaurant near me” and ensure you’re ordering from the best restaurants nearby for the greatest chance for a hot, tasty pizza delivery order from participating locations.
5. Find Good Pizza Promotions Near You
Nothing feels better than getting a fantastic deal on a pizza you love. These days, online marketing campaigns are incredibly customer-friendly and rewarding.
Between gift cards, the chance to join a membership reward program and earn loyalty points, meal deals that change every week, delivery specials, and other promotions, it’s more likely there’s a way to save on a carryout order than not.
Participating locations for your favorite pizza restaurant may have local-only promotions, too, which you can get if you join a mailing list or membership. Sometimes, all it takes is filling out a form, and all the weekly savings are yours!
6. The People Behind the Pizza
Do the people who make the pizza matter? You bet they do!
Of course, how pizzeria owners care for their customers matters, but so does how they care for their employees, the environment, and the world in which they live.
Do they recycle as much as they can? Are their ingredients locally sourced where possible to reduce carbon footprints? Are employees paid a fair wage? Do their employees look happy?
Or are they always hiring? No one wants to join a restaurant staff that’s not treated well or has a high turnover because the working conditions aren’t great.
Satisfied employees make every pizza order with attention and care, and they’re served with pride. Often, the best service goes hand-in-hand with the best pizza.
Plaza Pizza Knows Pizza
We’ve been in the pizza business for over 50 years. To make a beautifully flavorful pizza, we’ve created our own sauce that gets made fresh daily, as does the dough for our crusts at all of our participating locations. Our pizzas are made-to-order, but they’re also as fresh as possible.
From our proprietary sauce to our signature thin crust with the cracker crunch that our customers have loved for decades, Plaza Pizza has stayed true to what makes our pizza an Ohio institution.
We know pizza and love to prepare your favorite pizza order for dinner!
If you’re in Newark or Heath, Ohio, we’re ready to make the pizza you love most. Order now online or by phone!