Building Your Own Twelve Inch Pizza or Calzone, Step by Step

The specialty pizzas on the Broken Tree Pizza menu are already built for you, twenty-five of them across five sauces. Customize Your Own is the other option: a twelve inch pizza or calzone that starts at $12 and comes with house blend cheese included, then gets built entirely to your own order across four steps.

Step 1: pick a shape

Pizza or calzone. Both are twelve inches, both start at the same $12 base, and both come with house blend cheese before you add anything. The only difference between them is the shape they come out of the oven in, which means the sauce, topping, and finish choices below work exactly the same way for either one.

Step 2: choose your sauce

There are six to choose from: red, white, bbq, garlic, pesto, or green chili oil. That last one is worth knowing about, because it doesn't get its own section on the specialty pizza menu, it only turns up as a drizzle inside a couple of specialty pies like the Sweaty Pig and the Queen Bee. Build your own is the only place on the menu where you can order green chili oil as the base sauce for the whole pizza.

Step 3: choose your toppings, up to five

Toppings are priced in three tiers, and knowing the tiers ahead of time makes it a lot easier to build a pizza to a price you already have in mind.

• $1 each: artichoke, banana peppers, black olives, green peppers, jalapeno peppers, red onion, roasted garlic, roasted red peppers.
• $2 each: bacon, basil, chicken, kalamata olives, mushroom, pepperoni, pineapple, sausage.
• $3 each: calabrese salami, feta cheese, fresh mozzarella, goat cheese, gyro slices, ham, prosciutto.

Looking at what's actually in each tier, the $1 group is mostly raw vegetables and jarred items like olives and roasted peppers, the $3 group is cured meats and specialty cheeses, calabrese salami, prosciutto, and fresh mozzarella among them, and the $2 middle tier is where chicken, sausage, and bacon land. Once you notice that pattern, it's easier to guess where a topping you want is priced before you even check the list.

Step 4: choose a finish, added after the oven

This step is optional, and it's the one people miss the first time they order. Finishes aren't cooked into the pizza, they're added after the pizza or calzone comes out of the wood fired oven, the same way several of the specialty pizzas get their balsamic glaze or honey drizzle. Each finish is $1: arugula, balsamic glaze, cilantro, olive oil drizzle, green chili oil drizzle, or honey drizzle.

Two real examples, priced out

A white sauce calzone with three $2 toppings, say chicken, bacon, and mushroom, plus a balsamic glaze finish, comes to $12 for the base, $6 for the toppings, and $1 for the finish, which is $19 total. Go bigger with a pesto pizza carrying five toppings, one from each price tier repeated (say roasted garlic and red onion at $1 each, chicken and sausage at $2 each, and fresh mozzarella at $3), and you're at $12 plus $9 in toppings, $21 before any finish. Either way, it's a menu you can price out before you order, not a mystery until the check comes.

Why it works well for a table that doesn't agree

Nobody has to negotiate down to a shared pizza everyone can live with. One person can build a red sauce pie loaded with meat, the person next to them can build a white sauce veggie pizza with no meat at all, and both come out of the same oven at the same time. It's the same reason the specialty menu spans five sauces in the first place, different people want genuinely different things, and the build your own menu is where that gets settled one pizza at a time.

Where it sits on price

The $12 base for Customize Your Own is below every specialty pizza on the menu, which range from $13 up to $17 depending on the pie. That means a build-your-own with just a topping or two is also the least expensive way to order a twelve inch pizza at Broken Tree Pizza, before you get into how you'd want it built.