But enough about mohels…
It’s not quite as thick as Detroits, and Detroits are square, anyway, making the 10-slice problem easy! 
I usually consider 2-3 slices per adult of a 14" pizza to be about right, but that’s for a varied group that may include skinnier folk, larger folk, menfolk, womenfolk. (So I guess 3/8 per person sounds about right). But always order at least one more than you need, not only just in case, but in the hopes of leftovers.
I also think 2-3 slices of a typical large pizza is a good dinner portion for random adults. But if I’m ordering pizza for a group, i ask everyone how many slices they want, and what flavors they like, it and try to make it work out.
I worked pizza in college and some of the special requests were pretty moronic, like asking that a small half anchovy pizza be put in a large box so the two halves could be separated by a few inches.
Yeah, if I were hanging out with “the boys,” if you will, I would probably go 4-6 per person, and ask “is everybody pretty hungry?” The situation would matter, too. Are we settled in for awhile, watching the game? I’ve definitely been out in my 30s with my friends at a bar and a group of four of us would knock back three (or was it even four?) 14" pizzas (square-cut) over the course of a long drinking night.
Your friends easy more than mine. And a lot of my pizza friends are young men.
Hey, we got people eating full pizzas in one sitting here. This was 3/4 pizza per person over about three hours.
Pizza is the perfect leftover food. I don’t think I’ve ever ordered “just enough” pizza for a group, always extra.
And if I was at a friend’s house and the ran out of pizza, I would politely say no if he asked if I was still hungry.
Yeah, my solution is “Just get 10 pizzas.”
I live in Asia, I learned very early… never order anything off the menu or different to normal. .
Just ask the pizza guy to eyeball-slice the pizza into 10 pieces, then take the 2 largest slices for yourself…because you ordered the pizza and have first dibs.
For the remaining slices, you can do one of two things:
- Survival of the fittest: Tell your 4 friends that it’s a free-for-all for the remaining slices. The strongest will get the larger slices; the weakest end up with the smallest slices.
- Assign based on your criteria: Example: “Bob, you’re kind of fat, so you get the skinniest slices.” “Betty, I like you best, so you get the biggest slices…etc.
I think it used to be that way when pizza was mainly sold by independents and not the chains. I would guess that now the chain type pizza with thicker crust is most common now.
Ehh, I don’t know. Pizza Hut, Domino’s, etc. have “hand tossed” as the default with a pan pizza being an extra.
Not since I was a teenager pooling my money with others for a pizza that I’ve tried to get an exact count of slices. That’s not how to order pizza. Take the number of people you have, multiply by two, and divide by 8. If it’s a whole number order another pizza. Yes, you can divide by 6 if you want to look like some sort of giant math dork, but that’s got nothing to do with how pizza works. Pizzas are cut into 8 pieces because that’s a practical size for a slice. There is no number of slices per person, you just have to order based on the idea that it’s at least 2 to make sure everyone has a reasonable amount of pizza to eat.
Interesting. I only learned very recently that Domino’s had the “hand tossed” pizza as an option. In this ever more so price competitive environment thinner crusts are more practical, not only less material but less cooking time as well. So the shift in dominant preference between ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ pizza may have shifted again. Perhaps one day this will be a bellwether of economic conditions or shifts in the political wind. But more likely based on price/quality assessment of the market by ‘Big Pizza’.
When I was delivering for Little Caesars thirty years ago – hardly the epitome of pizza in the US – they hand-worked the dough for the round pizzas. It wasn’t tossed in the air like you see in the meme but a lump of risen raw dough was worked into a disk without the aid of a hand rolling pin, never mind some sort of machine.
Now it may well be mechanized and/or automated. The CostCo by me renovated its snack bar, putting the pizza-making by some large windows. As I passed by the other day I saw a worker put a raw dough disk on a platter which rotated as a nozzle squirted sauce on it in a spiral. No idea how the disk might have been formed.
The line between thick and thin pizza is not all that clear. And of us could proclaim “My pizza is the right thickness, if yours is different it’s too thick or too thin”. Everybody who agrees with me will be right I’m sure you could find thin crust pizzas in the Chicago area considered thick crusts elsewhere. Pan pizzas are common at the independent pizzerias around here, from one place to another the thickness of the crust in the middle of the pizza varies somewhat, but the thickness and width of the outer ring of crust can change a lot. Some people have preferences for that extra heavy outer crust and the ‘pizza bones’ left at the end. There are so many styles to choose from, and even new styles not yet popularized, thick or thin barely describes a pizza preference. But it is a great thing that we have such choices, such variety. Just ask for 8 slices per pie.
Aside: Hand-tossing a pizza crust isn’t particularly difficult. When I was in college, I worked food service, often at the pizza station. We started with big lumps of dough that we had to flatten out. Usually we did it with a rolling pin, but I decided I’d try the tossing thing. Even without any training, and even being as uncoordinated as I am, I was able to do it passably well after only a few tries.
Anything like this guy?
Not really. Our thin crusts tend towards cracker thin (and is the usual pizza we eat. If you think Chicago is mostly a deep dish town, you’d be sorely mistaken. That’s just the style we’re known for because it’s different. I doubt the average Chicagoan eats it more than one or two times a year. I haven’t had any since … 2019?)