So I love pizza, but I don’t love how much it costs to eat it in Taiwan, at least at restaurants.
So I’m thinking I’d like to start cooking my own pizza. We don’t have an oven, but I am considering buying one of those small microwave sized ovens to cook pizza amongst other things. Obviously it is not ideal to cook pizza but it’s the best we can do with the space we have. So my questions are:
Is it actually cheaper to do it yourself after you buy all the ingredients?
Is it easy to buy pizza bases? Do Costco sell them?
Are there any brands of cheese or tomato sauce that you recommend for making pizza?
I loosely followed this recipe for the dough. For the tomato base you can just reduce a tin of chopped tomatoes - add some herbs, garlic, whatever you want to flavour the sauce with
For the cheese its that standard bag of mozzarella you get from P X Mart
I can throw out a pizza the size of the oven shelf within an hour.
WAAAAAAAY cheaper… but understand nothing can replace a mineral based wood fired oven. I have a tiny over (2 peices of toast) and i make pizza allthe time. It works but is slower as you need to monitor burning. I use the oven tray as a cookie cutter type tool to cut the flattened pizza dough to the right size. I buy all organic, good ingredients and make about 20 pizzas at a tme and freeze them. i expect half price for a$200 pizza, and WAY better quality ingredients. Compared to those $400 plus taipei type places, nevermind…youre in the green. The only reason to go out for pizza here is the atmosphere (not an issue with current shut down) and if they have a wood fired oven, that tastes 100x better.
A trick if you get an oven with some height. You can buy bbq slabs of slate from aboriginals for $100 pretty easily. Or spend more at a store and get a rock slab that fits. Unfinished. This creates a MUCH better pizza as its porus, compared to using metal trays.
I am Italian, saying first so for me making my own pizza in Taiwan is a necessity because what I find outside is scary at the best or outrageously expensive (genuine Italian restaurants).
Having said that, for those who find Pizza Hut, Domino’s and similar to be acceptable, making one at home is definitely gonna cost more in terms of ingredients, electricity bill, time and the initial investment for a decent oven. I find most stuff at Costco, apart from a nice tomato sauce from back home that is only sold at RT-Mart.
I don’t make cakes or biscuits, so let’s see what other say about that.
When I came out of quarantine, I bought a 30L Sampo from Carrefour. Light and easy to place around, I remember that it was on sale for less than 2,000 NTD. It does the job nicely.
I could have sworn we had a thread about cooking pizza at home, but I can’t find one. There’s quite a bit of tangential information in two threads I’ll link below.
I cook decent pizza at home with a Doctor Goods oven, discussed a lot in the “Home oven” thread below. I believe some of the ovens sold at Costco will also work. A typical toaster oven in my opinion probably can’t cook a pizza, although if you’re using a frozen pizza shell I guess it could work. You probably want something that’ll go up to 250C / 480F.
I’m not sure if it’s cheaper. For better or worse, regularly cooking pizza at home has made the delivery options taste awful to me. But the big problem is that making pizza is admittedly something of an adventure: make the dough, wait for it to rise, make the sauce, roll out dough, meanwhile have the oven preheating … (But I’m slow in the kitchen; of course, you can make things at different times, and if you stock the freezer the process can be faster.)
I’m not sure what you mean by pizza base. I’ve probably seen pizza sauce around, but I don’t think I’ve ever bought it. Quite easy to make at home - canned tomatoes (any imported brand; who knows, maybe local are good - never tried them) and red wine vinegar and a bit of oregano and that’s about it. I think I’ve seen frozen pizza shells at some of the baking stores, but they’re not a regular purchase for me, so I’m not sure. I make pizza dough in my bread machine or food processor. If you’ve got either of those, it’s easy to make.
Cheese: I usually buy blocks of mozzarella - Heritage brand, I think? - available at Carrefour or City Super. Once or twice I’ve bought the giant bags of shredded mozzarella at Costco, and they’re fine, but for me the money saved wasn’t worth the hassle of separating out the grated cheese into separate ziplock bags and then having a freezer full of cheese. (That’d be more appealing to me if I had a separate cabinet freezer.) Fresh mozzarella, also available but not as reliably, is better but for my palate doesn’t make a huge difference. If I notice it I’ll buy it, but I don’t seek it out. Totally fine salami / pepperoni is available at Costco, a few Carrefours, and City Super. Well, I only know one Carrefour that has it - the one near Zhishan Station - but presumably there are others.
The Kaiser they sell at Costco is a decent small oven.
Don’t use the low moisture mozzarella block at Costco. The two pack of the higher moisture content mozzarella makes much better pizza, especially if you blend in a little parmesan or grana padano.
A little blue truck parked near my home selling pizza using one of them ovens, was slow and the pizza was quite small, they didn’t last long.
We also have a slightly bigger blue truck, comes once a week and parks outside, they have a wood burning oven and do a 12" pizza for around 200NT.
I have a Sampo oven at home that does the job ok, just had a quick look online but couldn’t find it. I will say try and get an oven with an insulated door (mine has double glass like a microwave).
A lot of the ones here have the single glass sheet for a door, and are not that efficient or good at keeping a constant heat inside.
Edit: just found it online (we got a deal on ours and paid 2000NT new over a year ago)
I’ve made pizza a few times recently in a similar oven (this one). It works fairly well in my opinion, although I think a slightly higher temperature would be better (this oven nominally goes up to 230 °C, but I’m skeptical it has the power and insulation to really reach that temperature, judging from the oven thermometer I put inside). As you say, it’s not ideal, but there’s limited space in my kitchen as well and it works.
I probably wouldn’t try to cook two pizzas at once (as shown in the photo you posted) in an oven so small. Even if they fit, I doubt there’s enough power going in to maintain a high temperature.
It’s probably borderline to slightly cheaper, depending on where you usually buy pizza. Cheese etc. is still pretty expensive though, and it takes a bit more time. I suppose it’s slightly cheaper than Pizza Rock but a fair bit cheaper than Amore Pizza (NT$359 and NT$660, respectively, for the ones I usually get).
I’ve never seen them, but also never really looked. I’ve so far been making my own, and it’s surprisingly easy once you’ve got the hang of it. I usually roughly follow this recipe, with maybe a bit less olive oil (1 tbsp, say – 2 tbsp seemed like too much to me):
I prefer to make rectangular bases rather than circular ones – partly because I ended up with way more dough than I was expecting the first time I made it, but also it’s a better fit for the limited space inside the oven.
I’ve also been making my own tomato sauce from canned tomatoes, tomato paste, garlic, maybe onions, and some fresh herbs grown at home (basil, oregano, rosemary, etc.) – not too complicated either. Several recipes can be found here:
I’m not sure about the cheese. So far I’ve just used pre-grated cheese from PX Mart or a bigger bag from a baking supply store because it’s all I had, but it’s admittedly not the best. I’ll probably pick up some fresh mozzarella and maybe some other cheese the next time I go to Costco, but I haven’t been there for a while to avoid crowds.
The only other topping I’ve used so far is Costco salami (although salami isn’t my favorite). I was thinking about trying/making some other toppings like chicken and meatballs, but I didn’t have the time to try it yet.
so for me making my own pizza in Taiwan is a necessity because what I find outside is scary at the best or outrageously expensive (genuine Italian restaurants).
