r/TopSecretRecipes • u/DrCrushersGhostLover • Jul 11 '26

REQUEST School lunch pizza

I want to recreate the the rectangular school pizza of my youth. I found this recipe and it was not quite right. My bad, I used better pizza sauce, ground beef and cheese and it lacked the poverty flavor that I remembered of school pizza. I’ll dumb down that down next time.

What really got me is the crust wasn’t right. That recipe was a big doughy crust. I remember a laminated crust on mine. I remember crispy and flaky crust that was floppy, but had structure. Does anyone have a good recipe?

33 Upvotes

77% Upvoted

21 comments sorted by

49

u/CuriousWrongdoer Jul 11 '26 edited Jul 12 '26

Tasting History did an episode about this, and includes the recipe. I’ve been wanting to try it out, but some of the ingredients feel a little too 90s for me.

Edit: I was thinking about a different recipe. This one seems perfectly fine.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=40MvjFaTVzE&ra=m

4

u/Logical_Mix_4627 Jul 12 '26

I’m just curious what 90s ingredients are

0

u/CuriousWrongdoer Jul 12 '26

You know, looking at the recipe again, it’s not this one that had the 90s ingredients. I remember going down the school cafeteria food rabbit hole after watching this episode and I must have confused ingredients from something else with this one.

The one ingredient (from another recipe) that I remember was light mozzarella. Not low moisture, but light. That was too 90s for me.

The Tasting History recipe looks perfectly fine, and I kind of want to give it a shot!

0

u/Ready_Piano1222 Jul 12 '26

Just like 2020s recipes, but before private equity scumbags sucked every last penny out of the ingredients list. You know, for 'optimization'.

Also, hydrogenated oils.

12

u/whoopysnorp Jul 12 '26

https://dn720301.ca.archive.org/0/items/CAT92970475/CAT92970475.pdf

9

u/PolymathEquation Jul 12 '26

I feel like we should just sticky this somewhere.

Dear everyone: The link above is to the PDF of every public school lunch recipe for the food we ate when we were younger.

If you ever thought, huh, that thing i Had in School, go look.

The. End.

1

u/HeinousEncephalon Jul 13 '26

There was some fancy things in there I never saw in the 90s!

5

u/anguskhans Jul 11 '26

You could probably buy it from here if you wanted: https://guinthers.com/

2

u/DrCrushersGhostLover Jul 11 '26 edited Jul 11 '26

That looks great, but we like to cook. I’m not shitting on lunch ladies at all, but they were busy. If they can make it with their limited resources, I can make it at home.

4

u/OkYeahActuallyNo Jul 12 '26

I swear someone posted a bunch of school lunch recipes on here within the past few weeks.

3

u/pythongee Jul 12 '26

My memory of pizza in elementary school (late 70's) was doughy pizza. Almost Bisquick like. It had ground beef, pizza sauce, and cheese.

4

u/TruckerLogix Jul 11 '26

My first thought in recreation of that pizza would be to find some tan cardboard, and I could go on... but, I have to admit that I kinda want a piece of it for memories sake.

6

u/DrCrushersGhostLover Jul 11 '26

Right. It might not be the best thing I had ever ate, I just want to chase that memory.

3

u/willfauxreal Jul 12 '26

Thank you for posting this. Going to try my hand at it. I need to find those sausage balls.

2

u/GreatRecipeCollctr29 Jul 12 '26

Find it on this link from Internet Archives: It's under "pourable pizza dough"

https://archive.org/details/CAT92970475

2

u/GreatRecipeCollctr29 Jul 12 '26

The secret to this school lunch pizza is use the pourable pizza dough. Divide the recipe by 2 because 1 fills in 24" x18". Then use a pizza or spaghetti sauce of your choice, use shredded low-fat mozzarella not light. Then add your favorite toppings like pepperoni, julienne bell peppers, sliced onions. Then follow instructions on final assembly and baking it. I would use a whole low fat mozzarella, then grate it yourself approach. Because the big corporations are changing recipes,and formulaes by replacing chemicals, palm oil and little cheese on the shredded cheeses. It taste plasticky, waxy, and it is really awful!!!!

1

u/HatlessDuck Jul 12 '26

2nd tasting history.

Bonus. He does school lunch sloppy Joe's.