Forget Pizza Cutters. Break Frozen Pies Apart Right In The Plastic Instead
When you go to a pizzeria and see a chef elegantly slice a pie with a rocking pizza cutter, it can be hard to refrain from going online and ordering one of those massive blades for your own home. Fortunately, you don't need to dish out any money to successfully cut a bake-at-home pizza. The only caveat? It has to come in plastic packaging.
@theprophetisaiah Ima jeenyus. #fyp
A TikTok video shared a hack on how to cut a frozen pizza before it even goes in the oven. Before you take a frozen pizza out of its packaging, slide it so half of the pie is off the edge of a countertop or table. With one hand push on the table side of the pizza to keep it in place and press down on the other side with a swift motion to bend it in half.
Depending on how many slices you want, you can rotate the pizza 90 degrees and bend it in half once again. At this point, you can take the plastic wrap off and place one or all four pieces directly onto a pan to cook. One of the perks of this method is that you can mix and match slices from different kinds of pizzas and freeze the rest to heat up at another time. Or, if you just want a little snack, you can cook a slice or two and leave the rest in the freezer for another day.
The challenge of the perfect cut
The jury is out on the best time to cut a pizza after it's cooked, but this hack takes the pressure off cutting a cooked pie. Some professional chefs recommend slicing a pizza as soon as you can after taking it out of the oven. That way a rolling pizza cutter will easily slice into the melted cheese, soft dough, and hot toppings. However, in an interview with Business Insider, Chef Amy Riolo warns against cutting a cooked frozen pizza immediately. Extremely hot cheese can get stuck to the cutting wheel and rearrange the toppings. She suggests two minutes is the ideal waiting time before cutting into a hot pizza.
Statistica projects that 202.86 million Americans will consume frozen pizza in 2024, so there will be no shortage of opportunities for people to try cutting frozen pizza this year. If cutting a pizza perfectly is a skill you do not feel inclined to master, breaking a frozen pizza in the plastic might eliminate all the difficulties of getting the perfect slice.
What if your pizza doesn't come in plastic?
The strategy of snapping a frozen pizza before you put it in the oven gets messy very quickly if it isn't wrapped in plastic. You can still bend the pizza into four slices, but be prepared for some frozen cheese and toppings to fall off. If you are hesitant to try this method of cutting a pizza by hand, there is an alternative you can try to get the perfect slice after you cook your pizza. You can use pizza scissors to snip across a pie rather than rolling through it with a traditional pizza cutter. At a certain point, however, your utensil drawer might overflow with tools that get used once every few months.
For people who regularly buy plastic-wrapped frozen pies, simply breaking them while frozen can save you time and eliminate the need to invest in pizza-cutting tools. There are many ways you can elevate your frozen pizza experience, but pre-cutting your pizza without using any kind of blade is a satisfying hack that will change how you approach snacktime in the future.