Cutting a pizza into ten slices is the kind of thing that you might like to do for a number of reasons. Having a huge number of slices like that will allow you to feed a crowd, or even just make yourself feel as though you’re eating more pizza. What’s not to love about that?
In this article, we’re going to talk about slicing pizza into even ten slices, from the best way to make that happen to the actual math that you need to deal with. Without further ado, get your pizza wheel out, and let’s get started!
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Why ten slices?
Cutting a pizza into slices is a question of ergonomics. If you’ve made a pizza for yourself and you want to eat it, then you might not bother cutting it much at all - three or four huge slices may be perfectly fine for you to eat the pizza yourself, and bring a little tasty joy to your mouth.
If you’re going to share a pizza with your friends, you might want to cut the pizza that you’re working with into six or eight slices - those even numbers are really easy to manage when you’re slicing a pizza!
The reason that even numbers are easy to deal with is that they can all start with slicing the pizza in half. When the pizza is halved, the entire meal and cutting process is a lot easier to deal with. For eight slices, for example, you cut a pizza in half, then cut the halves in half, and keep on going until you reach eight slices in total.
However, because five is an odd number, you can’t just keep on slicing your halves in half - a little bit of math is needed to get from half a pizza down to five individual pieces, there.
The math
Okay, first thing first when it comes to doing pizza math is that you shouldn’t panic - pizza is delicious, and will easily quell the stress of having to do a little math if you really need to.
In this case, the math is really easy. A whole circle is made up of 360 degrees. That means that from the top of the pizza (where 12 would be on a clock) all around the pizza and back to the top, there are 360 different degrees that you need to manage. Dividing that number by ten is easy - 360 divided by ten is 36! This means that the angle each slice of pizza needs to be cut at is simply 36 degrees, which isn’t too hard to manage at all.
Okay, the math is all done now, so we can take a bit of a breather. Math is one of those things that is unavoidable in the kitchen, despite the fact that it’s a total nightmare to manage when it does occasionally come up.
Doing it by eye
Okay, so the thing to bear in mind about the 36-degree number that we came up with just now is that no one is coming to your pizza party with a protractor in their back pocket. With that in mind, you can easily take a step back and make a few mistakes - no one will notice. If they do, you can send them our way - who brings a protractor to a party?
So, to get started, we would suggest slicing the pizza in half, right down the center. As we said before, ten is an even number, so you can get started by slicing the pizza in half, and go from there.
Now, we have to divide each half into five individual pieces. This is very simple, of course, and it means that you can get a bit of a simpler handle on things. Get started by bearing in mind the nature of the 36-degree angle - a right angle is 90 degrees, so it’s just more than a third of that.
If it makes things a little easier to think of it as a shape, you can take a ‘v’ wedge out of the center of the pizza half, before dividing the remaining two wedges on either side. Your slices may be a little uneven in this regard, but you will be able to manage things more easily.
Remove that small wedge from the center of the half first, and then divide the remaining large wedges in half. This will create easy pizza slices that are a tenth of the overall pizza.
Practice makes perfect
At the end of the day, the best way to get good at slicing pizza into a pre-ordained number of slices is simply to do it. With that in mind, you might need to have a few attempts before you get it perfect every time.
Therefore, the next time that you cook a pizza just for yourself in your home, you might consider slicing it into ten slices, or at least having a quick go, so that when you do need to make up ten slices for a party, you’re totally ready to go with your great pizza skills.
If you’re looking to slice up the pizza into ten slices to make it easier to share at a party, opting for ten slices (in a conventional shape) might not be the way to go. Instead, you might consider trying slicing down the center of the pizza, as before, and then making many different cuts across the pizza, perpendicular to the central slice.
This will leave you with many pieces of pizza, all with a little handle of crust, that could be easily picked up and shared around a party. Since it involves less math and slightly easier slices of pizza to handle, it might be worth considering for your next pizza party - give it a go!
We hope that this article has made it a little easier to slice up a pizza into ten slices for your next pizza party. Pizza is, simply, too good not to be shared. Be sure that you invite some friends over, and then have a go at your new skill!