How Much Does It Cost To Make A Homemade Pizza

Feb 17, 2024andris lagsdin0 comments

Have you ever walked by a pizza joint, smelled the fragrant aroma of fresh, fire-roasted tomatoes, homemade pizza dough, and melting mozzarella, and wondered if you could make your own oven-baked pizza with the same quality at home for your friends and family?

We did the math, we used only the best ingredients. The cost to make a pizza at home is going to shock you.

Well, you can!

With a few simple ingredients, a Baking Steel Original and a little time spent preparing the ingredients, you can have a delicious, homemade pizza that will make you a rock star (or at least the star of your household or friends).

But how much does it cost to make pizza? Let’s take a look.

The Cost Of Home Pizza Ingredients

To make a pizza, you need dough and toppings – that’s about it!

Pizza Dough Ingredients:

Flour - $25.00

You can certainly go to the market and go with mid-range with flours like King Arther Flour, they are great for home - but our favorite is Central Milling high gluten flour (we do specialize in pizza-making).

A 5lb (2267 gram) bag costs $9.99 plus a shipping cost of $15.00. If you break the cost down even further, a gram of Central Milling Organic Flour costs about $0.01.

Water - Free

While we do prefer filtered water, we can all agree water is relatively free.

Sea Salt - $1.99

Almost any sea salt brand works for pizza dough and a standard 700-gram bag of sea salt works out at $0.002 per gram.

Yeast - $6.99

You can get a 113-gram jar of Fleischmann yeast for $6.99, which works out to $0.06 per gram.

Pizza Dough Cost Breakdown

So now, let’s break that cost down further to see how much a single pizza dough costs. Our basic batch of 72-hour dough recipe consists of the following:

500 grams of flour
350 grams of water
16 grams of sea salt
1 gram of yeast

Ingredient	Cost per gram	Total Cost
500 grams of flour	$0.011	$5.50
350 grams of water	Free	Free
16 grams of sea salt	$0.002	$0.032
1 gram of yeast	$0.06	$0.06

The total cost of one batch of pizza dough is $5.592.

With each pizza dough, we can make three pizzas. So each pizza officially costs $1.86 per dough cost.

Homemade Pizza Ingredient Toppings:

Now for the toppings! Boy, do we love pizza toppings. Granted, you can get pretty elaborate on pizza toppings, but we’ll keep it simple for now. If you make a basic pizza, you only need three things: tomatoes, cheese, and basil (in our opinion).

The high-quality and organic topping ingredients below will easily cover the three pizzas we’ve made from the pizza dough ingredients above.

Pizza Topping Ingredients

Tomatoes $3.99

A 28oz can of our favorite organic tomatoes costs about $3.99. We opt for organic, and buying bulk can make tomatoes even cheaper. But for the sake of this breakdown, we’ll stick with $3.99. These tomatoes are available at your local Whole Foods Market.

Mozzarella Cheese

The options for mozzarella are endless. A Whole Milk low moisture mozzarella (0.5lbs) will cost about $7.99, while a fresh mozzarella (0.5lbs) will cost $9.99. We will stick with the low moisture mozzarella and use the $7.99 in this post.

Fresh Basil - Free

Now, we happen to have plenty of Basil growing in our garden, so this ingredient for us is free. A bag of fresh basil from the grocery store might only set you back a few dollars. Or you can start growing your own basil –which we highly recommend!

Pizza Topping Cost Breakdown

Pizza toppings can be pretty subjective. You might like it extra cheesy or more tomato-y. Let’s assume you will use the entire can of tomatoes, the half pound of cheese, and the basil if you have it. Either way, the above ingredients are enough to cover your three pizzas how you see fit.

If you prefer a little drier pizza and don’t use all these ingredients, you can easily save them for the next round of pizza making. Trust us, there will be a next time!

Tomatoes	Mozzarella	Basil
$3.99	$7.99	Free

The total cost of toppings for three pizzas is $11.98. If you break that down per pizza, you’re looking at $3.99 per pizza.

Total Cost To Make 3 Pizzas

Now that we’ve broken costs down into dough and toppings let’s look at how much each pizza will cost in total to make at home.

To recap our ingredient costs:

Dough $5.50
Mozzarella $7.99
Tomatoes $3.99

The total cost for your pizza-making adventure is $17.48. But when you divide that by the three pizzas you’re making, your cost is $5.82 per pizza! (17.48/3= $5.82)

The best part? After you bake and eat your pizzas, there will likely be leftovers because these ingredients are enough to make three large oven-baked pizzas.

How Does Homemade Pizza Compare To Take Out?

We all know buying pizza from a restaurant can make a dent in your wallet –you’re easily looking at $15-20 dollars per pizza. The same three large pizzas you just made at home would set you back a good $40-$50 at a restaurant or even takeout. If you’re ordering pizzas several times a week for a year, you’re looking at several thousand dollars.

On the other hand, making a pizza at home will be less than a third of that price. Plus, you know exactly what quality ingredients have gone in your pizzas. You can run these numbers any way you like, but the bottom line is making pizza at home is conservatively going to save you thousands of dollars.

Using the finest ingredients at home is better on your wallet and a better experience with family and friends. Sure, you might need to spring for the cost of the Baking Steel for $119, but that’s peanuts compared to the thousands you will be spending on takeout pizza.