Back in May 2022 — let the record show, 20 months ago — I analysed the cost of the ingredients of an excellent home-made pizza. Based on the costs of bread flour, salt, yeast, tinned tomatoes and extra mature cheddar, I found that the per-pizza cost of ingredients was an satisfyingly low 53p (plus another 15p for the electricity to bake them, amortised over four pizzas for a total of 68p per pizza). Yum.
Here’s one I prepared earlier. This, unlike the cheaper version in the text, includes sliced chorizo and pickled jalapeños.
I took a look at the corresponding prices in our most recent ASDA order, placed on the very last day of 2023. Here’s what I found:
- Bread flour up from £1 to £1.30 per 1.5 kg bag.
- Salt up from 30p to 65p per 750g container.
- Yeast up from £1.10 to £1.50 per 100g tin.
- Tomatoes up from 32p to 35p per can.
- Extra mature cheddar up from £3.50 to £5 per 750g.
Those are increases of 30%, 117%, 36%, 9% and 43% for the five principal ingredients, an average increase of 47%.
But adding and averaging percentages doesn’t necessarily yield a very meaningful result, so let’s look at how these individual price rises have affected the cost of a single pizza. I use 150g flour, trace amounts of salt and yeast, a quarter-tin of tomatoes and 75g cheese. At the old prices, that’s 10p, 8p and 35p, for a total of 53p. At the new prices, it’s 13p, 9p and 50p, for a total of 72p. That’s an increase of 34%.
(The cost of baking the pizzas is currently unchanged, as the cost of electricity remains about 30p per unit: I made it two units to cook a batch of four pizzas, which amortizes to 15p each. But I understand that the electricity price is soon to rise.)
What to make of this? First, 72p for the ingredients of a good pizza remains amazing value. Even if you’re cooking a single one the cost of the electricity is likely only about a single unit, so you’re looking at a pound for a delicious meal.
The pizza I made (and ate) tonight. This one is more expensive than the minimal pizza discussed in the text, as it uses mozarella instead of cheddar, and includes sliced chorizo and pickled jalapeños.
But second, the rise in the price of these staple ingredients (flour, tinnned tomatoes, cheese) has been pretty significant. 34% across 20 months is equivalent to annual inflation of more than 19% — nearly five times the nominal inflation rate of 4.2% reported by the ONS for the 12 months to December 2023.
And although inflation has been falling since the highs of last year, the ONS’s graph across the 20 months since I first posted on pizza prices never shows it having reached more than half of this 19% rise:
All we can conclude is that staple-food inflation has been much higher than the headline figure. I guess the aggregate inflation figure has been kept relatively low by a fall in prices of, I dunno, super-yachts or something.
The Reinvigorated Programmer 
Yes, yes, the cost of bread, cheese and other “mundane” items may have risen considerably, but my manservant assures me that Jaffa Cakes, Beef Wellington, and gold leafed desserts are actually MORE affordable than last year, so it all comes out in the wash, wot?
Aged cheddar! Yow! English pizza is definitely not the same as US pizza, though I imagine neither is the same as the stuff they ate in Italy before they started modifying pizza for the tourist trade. I’ve had some great English cheddars, so it sounds delicious though not very Italian.
The other thing I noticed. No garlic! Is this an English thing? The Italian North End in Boston was notorious for being full of “authentic” Italian restaurants that didn’t use garlic or oregano or a whole bunch of things that were used in Italy and Italian neighborhoods in the rest of the US. I remember a friend of mine asking for a packet of oregano.
Kaleberg, English pizza would properly be made with mozzarella. But that’s an expensive option at the moment, and when I made the original post I was focussed on keeping prices down. I use grated cheddar when I am out of mozzarella, and it’s delicious — though of course very different.
Garlic is great, but it’s not part of an authentic Neopolitan pizza.