The Right Time To Cut Pizza For The Best Results

Making your own homemade pizza from scratch surely has to be some kind of signal that you've truly reached adulthood, though tossing a frozen pizza into the oven at the end of a long, tiring day, when you have no energy for anything else, is maybe a more honest reflection of that fact. With inflation doing its thing (leading to low consumer pizza loyalty), eating in is the more cost-efficient option. But once you remove your uncut pie from the piping hot oven, do you know the best time to slice it?

For the most effortless cuts, make your pizza slices with a sharp pizza cutter just a few seconds after you pull your intact pie out of the oven. The reasoning is that everything — but especially the crust — is still soft and forgiving. Even just a few minutes after taking it out of the oven things will start to solidify, and you will encounter more resistance when attempting to cut it.

Now, if you don't have a pizza cutter and are simply using a large knife (like a chef's knife — you'll want something with a smooth blade, not a serrated edge), you should actually wait until the pizza has cooled down and the cheese has started to congeal. Otherwise, the cheese is likely to stick to your blade.

In addition to waiting just a few seconds to cut your piping hot pizza, you'll also want to be sure you have a sharp enough pizza cutter. If you're making enough pizza on a monthly basis, you might want to invest in a good-quality wheel cutter, like this one from OXO, or an inexpensive rocking cutter like this one by ZOCY.

You should also consider the different ways you can slice up a pizza to maximize both the number of people you can feed and the fun of eating the pie. For example, you absolutely could just slice it into the typical triangle shapes, but in order to feed a crowd and ensure everyone gets a piece, try cutting your pizza into tavern-style squares instead (same amount of pizza, more pieces). Or, make one cut down the middle of the pizza, and then run your cutter through that line perpendicularly, making rectangular strips as thin or as thick as you want — they'll be perfect for dipping and then biting without getting sauce at the corners of your mouth.