How long does it take to make a pizza?

Author: Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett
Rev 01: 06.17.2022

Maybe you have a very specific answer that jumps into your brain when confronted with this question, or maybe you have no idea because you have never made pizza before, but if you ask 20 different people this question, you will very quickly realize that the most specific answer you can really expect to get everyone to agree upon is “It depends.” 

Does “Make a Pizza” mean making everything from scratch? How “from scratch” is scratch? Do I need to make my own dough for the crust? What kind of dough? Do I have to go out and mill my own flour? Do I need to grow my own ingredients? If the expectation for “make a pizza” means growing and harvesting all of the ingredients from our own farm, the answer seems like it could take years to make a real pizza, as you have to raise a milking cow, make cheese, grow wheat, tomatoes, and whatever other toppings you were going to put on the pizza. Also, in my life, I have only met a handful of people who have ever been halfway close to meeting these farm-to-table expectations of “making a pizza.” And if this becomes THE socially acceptable definition of “making a pizza,” then we have probably just turned pizza into a delicacy that requires a life time dedication in order to do well. How long does it take to make a pizza? A lifetime, apparently.

That sounds super extra and totally elitist to me, even if that pizza would probably be pretty tasty (assuming the person also had any talent cooking) because fresh ingredients often do make for higher quality food, but when I want to eat a pizza, I don’t want to wait a life time for it to be made. So while that pizza might sound nice, I don’t really have anywhere near those kinds of expectations every time I hear someone say they are going to make a pizza, and sometimes, when I am in the middle of a serious project and have a pizza at home in my freezer, spending 30 minutes to preheat the oven and then cook a frozen pizza is going to be all the “making a pizza” I need for dinner, and no one is going to question that definition of “making a pizza” in a way that is going to have any impact on my life unless I let it, or unless the person judging me has so much power over my life that I have to defer to them against my own needs and abilities. 

But what about if I have people over for dinner and tell them we will be making pizzas for dinner? Do I have an obligation to tell my friends in advance whether I will be making pizzas from scratch or cooking frozen pizzas? What if they are not my friends, but my boss or potential new employer? What if the quality of the frozen pizza is so high, that they will not be able to tell whether I made the pizza from scratch or bought it pre-made and only heated it up? What if I am so rich that I have a personal chef that makes the pizzas for us? Did I lie when I said “we will be making pizzas for dinner?”  

All of these examples and ways to complicate what seems like it should be a simple question might feel far-fetched, but if the purpose of asking the initial question, “How long does it take to make a pizza?” is to establish a reasonable expectation for how long it might take for me to make a pizza that I am willing to eat for dinner or serve to others for dinner, it is important to realize that the answer that jumps into my head, and the answer that jumps into the head of the person I am asking the question to might depend a whole lot on our access to resources that may not be equally shared. There are many hidden assumptions in the question that only become observable when the expectations of the asker of the question and the answerer of the question fail to line up with each other’s reality.

When we don’t know if the person giving us the task of “making a pizza” is asking us to go out and learn how to grow grain to mill into flour to make into dough to make into a pizza, or just pull a frozen pizza out of our freezer, we can face a whole lot of anxiety about how we will be evaluated on completing this task, or what is a reasonable answer to the question of how long it will take. Complicating the situation further and increasing this anxiety is the fact that we live in a society where, with the right amount of money, we could probably get away with just paying a third party to make an even better pizza than either one of us are going to be able to make ourselves, and now the question of: “how long does it take to make a pizza?” is really a question of “how much of myself and my resources do I need to invest in the task of ‘making a pizza?” and even that question is further complicated when we realize that it is still impossible to answer without also asking ourselves “To whom does my answer to this question matter, and why am I the one being asked to answer it?” 

Meanwhile, the person who had never been asked this question before, is just going to type “How long does it take to make a pizza” into google (with no question mark) and learn that “a pizza may take between 8-15 minutes to bake to perfection.” Then they stop thinking about this question, or any question like it, because the internet, via hungryhowies.com has given them an answer: 8-15 minutes.