Pizza: Homemade vs. Delivered

I've been making my own pizza for a long time- more than ten years. This isn't because I'm a crazy-ambitious home cook who makes everything harder than it needs to be (I am) or because I like to look smugly down my nose at others with less time and kitchen-savvy as they funnel their dollars into the pizza-industrial complex (I do). It's because I took a cooking class at a local shop on the subject of pizza, a class that empowered me to DIY the pie from then on. This is principally due to cheapness. Pizza is one of those foods that is, I suspect, marked up astronomically, and that orderers are charged a premium for the alchemical combination of flour, yeast, tomatoes and cheese and the subsequent delivery of same. Factoring in travel time, homemade pizza (with dough made from scratch) doesn't take that much longer than delivered.

Over the years, my recipe has acquired a few tweaks, most notably the substitution of specialty pizza flour for bread flour (which works fine, but yields stiffer/less elastic dough). But it's essentially the same recipe I scored over a decade ago at Orange Tree Imports. I use 6-In-1 ground tomatoes straight from the can as my sauce and top it with whatever appeals - here, pepperoni. I had to splash out for a baking stone and wooden peel which paid for themselves very quickly in conserved 'za expenditures. It makes for a very easy and interactive dinner party at which guests are easily impressed by homemade dough. All would be dandy in the pizza department chez dudes if only the dudes themselves would abandon their fixation on "delivered pizza", their conviction that it is superior in every way and that the sight of a beat-up 1992 Accord with a light-up delivery sign on the roof pulling into our driveway is cause for delirious celebration.