When it comes to cutting a pizza in your home, there is any number of different slices that you might want to opt for. This could be for any number of reasons, from the fact that you’re serving pizza to a very specific number of people, or that you just want to make sure that your guests, family, or even just yourself, has a certain amount of pizza to enjoy.
Seven is a rare number to think of for cutting pizza slices into since it’s prime. That means that you couldn’t offer every one of your guests two or three slices - seven is only divisible by one and seven, meaning that each of your guests can only have one slice.
To that end, it could be very important to make sure that you have precisely seven slices.
In this article, we’re going to talk about the best ways to make sure that you can cut a pizza into seven slices, and, throughout, we’re going to make sure that the simplicity of the process is totally understood: it can be a little tricky, sometimes.
Choose your preferred tool
There are a few tools that you might want to use to cut a pizza, from a knife to a pizza wheel, and a wide range of things in between. However, those two options are your best bet for one reason: you’re not going to slice the pizza in half at any stage in the process. Therefore, you need to be able to only cut from the center of the pizza to the edge.
A pizza wheel is great for this job since the intense sharpness of the blade means that you can easily slice from the crust inwards. Therefore, to make some of your first cuts into the pizza itself, we would suggest starting at the crust with your pizza wheel, and pressing it forward to the center of the pizza itself - this will ensure that your pizza is well-sliced and that the cheese and toppings aren’t dragged from the pizza as they can be with a blunt knife.
A knife can be ideal for this job too, since you can place the tip of the blade right in the center of the pizza, and then bring the rest of the knife down in a straight line, ensuring that there’s a perfect line between the center and the edge of the pizza.
It’s really up to you which of these tools you would prefer to use, but we might recommend a knife, today. The reason for that is that when slicing a pizza into seven even slices, you won’t be slicing a pizza in half, which is the most common use for a pizza wheel. Therefore, a knife may be more convenient.
Consider the angles
This is something that we always do when slicing a pizza or at least something that we do when we find ourselves having to slice a pizza into a new number of slices.
A circle has a total of 360˚, which is one of those facts from math class that we might never forget. That number means that, to calculate the size of a slice of pizza, we can divide 360˚ by 7, getting 51˚.
If we were doing this on paper, therefore, you could draw a line from the center to the edge of a circle, and then use a protractor to make lines every 51˚ until you reached the line that you started at. Hey presto, that’s how it works!
However, if you don’t have a protractor to hand, a more customary measurement might be easier to work with. Therefore, consider it this way - a perfect corner is 90˚. Therefore, half of that is 45˚. So, to cut a 51˚ slice of pizza by eye, you’ll be best served by creating a ninety-degree angle with your finger and thumb, and then treating a slice as roughly half that much, or a little more.
This is by no means an effective or reliable way to measure degrees of pizza or anything similar when you’re cutting pizza, but it can work well if you’re in a pinch
Hunt down a pizza protractor
If you’re really desperate to ensure that the pizza slices you’re creating are exactly a seventh of the pizza, then you could try to seek out a pizza protractor. That tool would help you to create the perfect-sized slices and, in turn, the ideal portions for the group that you’re working with.
You can get pizza protractors online quite easily, and you can also look for them in cookware stores and similar options. They aren’t as rare as you might think, meaning that you can quite easily ensure that your pizza slices are ideal.
What type of knife is ideal for slicing pizza?
There are only two things to bear in mind for this point: sharpness, and length.
The knife that you’re using needs to be as sharp as possible, as a blunt knife will pull some cheese and toppings from the pizza as it cuts. A sharp knife, conversely, will ensure that the pizza is cut into perfect slices and that the toppings remain on the pizza itself. If your knives need to be sharpened, you can always pick up a knife sharpener - they’re fairly inexpensive and will make slicing much easier. Furthermore, accidentally cutting yourself with a sharp knife is safer than cutting yourself with a dull one: it will heal much more quickly.
The length of the knife you’re using ideally needs to be at least the same as the radius of the pizza that you’re working with. If you’re trying to use a paring knife on a sixteen-inch pizza, for example, you’ll end up making many small cuts. That will result in a non-straight line, which wouldn’t be ideal.
Instead, use a knife the same size or larger than the radius of the pizza.
We hope that this article has given you some handy pointers on cutting pizza into seven slices, and that everyone that receives a piece is thrilled with their portion!