Learning in the Kitchen – Pizza

Children learn when they are having fun and what could be more fun than making pizza, eating pizza and having a go at some Pizza Maths?

Fascinating Pizza Facts

There are approximately 10,000 pizzerias in the UK and 61,269 in the United States. (Source: American Business Lists) Each man, woman and child in America eats an average of 46 slices of pizza a year!

Over 5 billion pizzas are sold worldwide each year.

The world’s largest pizza before tha latest record was ‘built’ on October 11, 1987 by Lorenzo Amato and Louis Piancone.

Pepperoni is America’s favourite topping (36% of all pizza orders); they eat approximately 251,770,000 pounds per year. Other popular pizza toppings are mushrooms, extra cheese, sausage,green pepper and onion. The UK’s favourite topping is chicken.

What Fascinating Pizza Facts can you discover?

Pizza Tasting

Provide a variety of different shop-bought pizzas  – you could try this two ways. Are you trying to discover the best shop based pizza or find the tastiest pizza? With my children we decided to put different shops on pizza trial. As our oven can only cope with cooking 3 pizzas at a time we chose 3 different flavoured pizzas. The children decided the wanted to test pizzas from Iceland – oh the fun I had letting them decide which flavours we should try. Fred chose doner kebab pizza; Alex decided upon Hot Dog flavour and then thankfully Katy was thinking sensibly and choose Ham and Pineapple!

We looked the ingredients and compared the appearance of the pizzas and decided to give them star awards. Ham and Pineapple was popular by all and so we gave it 5 stars, next we were most impressed with the doner kebab pizza and gave it 3 stars but unfortunately the Hot Dog pizza did not impress so it got just 1 star.

This inspired us to make our own Hot Dog pizza

Ingredients

• jar tomato sauce (shop bought pizza sauce)
• 100g cheddar cheese
• 3 cooked hot dogs
• 1 sliced onion
• shop bought pizza base

Recipe

1. Use a shop bought pizza base.
2. Spread the tomato sauce over the pizza base
3. Pour enough olive oil into a frying pan to cover it and add the onions and stir
4. Continue to stir the onions until they are brown
5. When the caramelising process has happened, take the onions off of the heat and add 3 tablespoons of water and stir
6. Drain any liquid from the frying pan and pour onions over the pizza base
7. Grate the cheese and sprinkle over the pizza
8. Slice the hot dogs into thin slices and arrange over the pizza

We much preferred our home-made Hot Dog pizza!

Next the children wanted to make their own pizza base so we looked for various recipes:

http://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/pizza-recipes/pizza-dough

We also tried this one using half a french stick as a base:

http://www.kidscafe.org.uk/recipes.htm#PZZ

I think children really enjoyed making the dough themselves and it wasn’t difficult to do and we found this thin crust recipe to be nicer than Jamie Olivers!

http://www.pizzatoppings.co.uk/pizza-dough-recipes/thin-pizza-dough/thin-crust-pizza/

We also experimented with different toppings  and discussed the effect would be if we added too much or too little. They loved all the measuring and experimenting and for my older son we even got some pizza ratio maths problems in!

Our next pizza adventure will be testing making our own tomato sauce base recipes as so far we have only used shop bought products and we found the Napolina range to be the best

http://www.napolina.com/text_only/our_range.html

Further investigations with pizza:

• Children could try different shapes. How long does each take to cook? Which is easiest to make? How evenly does it cook?

Children could try different finishes. What differences do various finishes make to the taste and appearance? How much does each cost?

Pizza Maths Links:

http://nrich.maths.org/104

http://www.bbc.co.uk/skillswise/numbers/fractiondecimalpercentage/fractions/introduction/activity.shtml

http://www.bgfl.org/bgfl/custom/resources_ftp/client_ftp/ks2/maths/fractions/index.htm

http://www.bbc.co.uk/skillswise/numbers/fractiondecimalpercentage/fractions/simplifyingfractions/activity.shtml

http://www.primarygames.com/fractions/start.htm

Now when you serve up Pizza you can ask kids lots of pizza fraction questions!

Googling pizza fraction questions brings up loads of pizza fraction worksheets

http://www.google.co.uk/#hl=en&source=hp&q=pizza+fraction+questions&meta=&aq=f&oq=pizza+fraction+questions&fp=29e8dc7ea7568563

Now will kids look delighted when you say Pizza is for tea?