Blog

Fresh pizza, whether delivered at your doorstep or labored over at home, remains one of life’s greatest pleasures. Ideally, you’ll want your pizza to have a warm and crispy crust, slightly yeasty smell, and cheese that’s just the right temperature to wolf down without scorching your mouth.

Regardless of how great your pizza turns out, you can still have problems cutting it. The cutter may not be sharp enough to penetrate through the crust, resulting in jagged slices and pulled-off cheese. Since you don’t want to be that person who massacres everyone’s favorite pie, check out our guide on the best ways to cut pizza.

While the way you cut pizza doesn’t necessarily affect its taste, it can influence how much you want to eat the dish. Here are some tips for making sure your pizza is cut perfectly. 

You can either buy a new pizza cutter or sharpen the one you already have. Sometimes, we forget that a pizza cutter should function exactly like a knife and cut through pizza like it was nothing.

If you’re a regular pizza eater, you’ll want to sharpen your cutter as frequently as possible to get a clean slice every single time. Pizza crust may seem like it’s easy enough to slice through, but cutting through it more times than one can count is bound to take its toll on any instrument.

If you’re making pizza at home, cut it as soon as it's removed from the oven. Pizza starts to become more rigid when you let it settle, which makes slicing through it a little more challenging. Still, you’ll want to wait a few minutes after cutting before actually picking up a slice to eat. This prevents you from burning your tongue and the roof of your mouth.

To get that perfect slice, let your pizza sit for just a few seconds once it’s out of the oven, then begin slicing.

A chef’s knife makes an excellent substitute for a pizza cutter. However, you want to make sure that you have one that’s large enough to cover the diameter of your pizza. When cutting, rock your knife back and forth.

Unlike when you’re using a pizza cutter, using a knife requires you to wait a little bit longer before slicing. This prevents more cheese than usual from sticking to your blade. Due to a pizza cutter’s rotational motion, there’s less of a chance for the cheese to stick to it.

On the other hand, the back-and-forth movement of a chef’s knife is just the kind of motion that makes cheese adhere to the blade. This means you need to have a paper or dish towel lying around when using a chef’s knife to cut pizza. Lightly and carefully swipe the towel through the blade before going for that second cut.

Unlike mathematicians, we don’t view pizza cutting as a sort-of geometric dance that results in equal benefits for everyone. When it comes to eating, we rarely care about math unless it means “more for us.”

Nevertheless, this doesn’t mean that we aren’t at least a little bit curious about the cutting method that doesn’t leave one intersection in the middle of the pie.

Since pizza normally requires cuts to intersect at one point in the middle, it’s the perfect medium for exploring various forms of “disk tiling.” The calculations then led to what is now dubbed the “perfect” way to slice pizza.

By cutting the pizza into curvy shields, you’re able to cut equally and create more intersections than the traditional cut. Still, this doesn’t mean you can accomplish this without a super-sharp pizza cutter. This ultra-crazy design calls for nothing less than a cutter that’s been sharpened professionally on a weekly basis.

So, to pull off the “curvy shield” cut, you’ll want to first cut three curved pieces across your pie. Then, divide the sections into two, which may sound simple enough but actually requires the patience of a saint.

And there you have it: a perfectly sliced pizza that’s good enough to eat.

Since pizza has long established itself to be life-changing in whatever form it comes, what does this new way to slice pizza have to contribute on a practical level? Is this going to be a case of “out with the old, in with the new?”

We’re sure you’ve heard of the saying, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Well, for the most part, this applies to the traditional way of cutting pizza that’s worked for most of us all these years. After all, it’s not the shape of the slice or the number of intersections that determine how much one enjoys pizza.

Still, part of tradition dictates that pizza be shared equally among members of a group. As such, you’ll want to make sure it’s cut equally and in the best way using an ultra-sharp pizza cutter or a chef’s knife. If you’re making your own pizza, make sure to slice it a few seconds after it leaves the oven for the best results.

Finally, unlike the mathematicians of the world, The Kitchen Warriors believes that one intersection is perfectly fine where pizza cutting is concerned. There’s no need to aim for that super-crazy design that’s likely to leave you with a ruined dinner mood more than anything else.