How do you track pizza?

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dan_IRL
dan_IRL Posts: 204 Member
in Food and Nutrition
This may be a niche question as it really only pertains to chicagoans and “tavern cut” pies. Not looking for criticism of the pizza. Just looking for how you track it?

Most chicagoans eat local thin crust. The deep dish Lou malnatis “Chicago style” is for when guests come in from out of town.

That said, thin crust is always cut party style/tavern cut/squares. First off what “restaurant” do you use for this and how do you track a “slice” as it doesn’t really translate to a triangle slice that most pizza places use.

Looking for answers from chicagoans or those familiar with what I’m talking about

Replies

  • jayemes
    jayemes Posts: 865 Member
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    I try to find a commercial equivalent to what I'm eating. I'm in NY, so I can look at a place like Sbarro's to get a basic estimate of a slice I'm having. If I was eating deep dish or sicilian I may go with Pizza Hut numbers for a similar slice. Try and find a chain that has calorie info and take your best guess
  • LAT1963
    LAT1963 Posts: 1,375 Member
    edited August 2019
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    I try to log unknown restaurant foods by their major components. First check online to see if data exists, if not...

    a 4 x 4 square of crust is probably the same calories as equal sized pie crust or bread; you could log it as a slice of bread.

    Cheese--how many grams did that look like to you?

    Tomato sauce--a teaspoon? a tablespoon? how much did it look like?

    Were there onions in the sauce? probably no more than a teaspoon on a slice that size.

    Onions as a topping? How much did it look like?

    etc.

    It won't be super accurate but can get you in the ballpark.

    You could also look for frozen pizzas with similar attributes and calories listed on the label.

    The dominant calorie source in pizza is going to be the fats or oils, so that's the thing to focus on. You might even ask the server how much oil goes into each pizza, they might know. If you look at frozen pizzas you can see a difference up to 800 calories between different pizza servings, partly due to size but mostly due to the amount of oil used in its preparation.
  • LyndaBSS
    LyndaBSS Posts: 6,964 Member
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    Can you contact the restaurant and ask?

    Pizza is one of the hardest entries, in my opinion. I believe you can find some deep dish entries.

    Good luck.
  • autumnblade75
    autumnblade75 Posts: 1,660 Member
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    I request that they cut my pizza into pie slices. Failing that, I try to calculate what percentage of the pizza I've eaten - count how many total squares and try to eat a proper ratio of crust pieces to middle pieces. (Actually, I prefer crust pieces, since I don't have to stick my fingers into the cheese, and the toppings don't all slide right off.)

    More often than not, we each get our own pie from Domino's, and I just eat the whole thing. I still request pie cut if I order thin crust, hand-tossed defaults to pie cut.

    Party cut pizza is an abomination. I've chosen to forgo pizza altogether rather than partake of those unstable, messy, difficult to log squares.
  • lynn_glenmont
    lynn_glenmont Posts: 9,964 Member
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    Can you weigh it (at least once, if not every time, to get a sense of what a slice weighs)? Then log it using the weight and the appropriate fast food pizza thin crust entry from USDAdatabase

    https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/search/list/?manu=&fgcd=&ds=SR&qlookup=Fast Food, Pizza Chain, 14" pizza, cheese topping, thin crust
  • lemurcat2
    lemurcat2 Posts: 7,885 Member
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    I found an entry in the database for Pizza Capri, square cut, cheese, and used that as a base and add ingredients, or I used to when I logged.

    I mostly get pizza from various local Italian places (like Coda di Volpe on Southport) and that's often not square cut (although it is thin crust), but we definitely get square cut at my office lunch Fridays when they get pizza. At restaurants I more often loosely estimate cals and log 1000 or whatever seems reasonable (again, back when I logged), but at first I tried to recreate it.
  • dan_IRL
    dan_IRL Posts: 204 Member
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    All great responses. Thanks. I’ll give some of these tips s a try the next time we order pizza pie.
  • ritzvin
    ritzvin Posts: 2,860 Member
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    Deep dish pizza is a particularly hard one to guess... As the pan bottom may be doused with a particularly large unknown quantity of oil before baking.

    For thin crust party, I would try to equate the surface area to the number of slices of a round pizza as best as possible and then log that number of slices of pizza from a thin crust/NY-style chain.
  • kshama2001
    kshama2001 Posts: 27,897 Member
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    99.99% of the time I eat pizza at home, and so can weigh it. Most of the pizza around here is like a local brand that also sells to local supermarkets, so the calories per two slices and weight info is available. I found an entry that has calories per gram, so just log the number of grams I am eating.

    Speaking of pizza, there is a new pizza place that sells bigger pizzas than our usual place. We've been having upset stomachs afterwards. I told my OH it was probably just a matter of overeating; he thought there was something wrong with the pizza. Turns out I was right :lol:

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