Forget Champagne and caviar. If you want to throw a good party, bring out a pizza. Humble though it may be, pizza is a guaranteed crowd-pleaser, which makes it the perfect food for any kind of party—but especially a game-day party.
For a host, there’s another huge upside to pizza: It’s as easy as 1-2-3. Believe it or not, our favorite game-day secret is bake-at-home pizza. While delivery pizza can arrive cold or (gasp!) late, with ready-made pizzas like Screamin’ Sicilian, all you need to do is pop one in the oven and you’ll be greeted with hot, fresh-baked pizza that takes no time to make and tastes incredible.
But as a good host, you also want to do a bit more than just drop a bunch of plain pies on the counter and walk away. That’s why we came up with these five saucy ideas to give your game-day pizza party some pizzazz.
Create A Pizza Buffet
Simple but oh-so-effective: Get a bunch of different varieties and set them all up like a buffet, so your friends can choose their favorite slices. Screamin’ Sicilian Pizza, a family-owned craft pizza company from Wisconsin, makes all of their pies with premium toppings, secret-recipe sauce, and whole-milk mozzarella. (In addition to catering to everyone’s taste, they’ll make your kitchen smell amazing.) Try the Original Holy Pepperoni and the Thin & Crispy Pepperoni for variations on a theme, and the Supremus Maximus (which has pepperoni, Italian sausage, red and yellow bell peppers, onions, and black olives) for an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink option that’ll be gone in seconds.
Screamin’ Sicilian Thin & Crispy Pepperoni Pizza
Screamin’ Sicilian Supremus Maximus Pizza
Set Up A Dipping-Sauce Station
Add another level of variety to your buffet by creating a little section at the end with a medley of dips. If you and your guests love hot sauce with your pies, say, offer up a few different options so people can taste-test which they like better. Or you can set up a wide range of options from ranch to BBQ sauce—something for every palate.
Opt For Carb Overload
In addition to the pizza, you’ll need some snacks around for everyone to nosh on during the game. And while there’s nothing wrong with standard potato chips or pretzels, nothing goes quite as well with pizza as breadsticks. Screamin’ Sicilian Cheesy Garlic Loaded Breadstix—made with a garlic-butter sauce and four cheeses (whole-milk mozzarella, provolone, Parmesan, and Romano)—are irresistible: garlicky, herbaceous, and oozing with cheese.
Screamin’ Sicilian Cheesy Garlic Loaded Breadstix
Get Creative With Drink Pairings
Whether your friends are more into wine, beer, cocktails, soda, or all of the above, you can have some fun here. Get a bunch of natural wines and a few kinds of craft beer, or make your own mocktails, and pair each with a different pizza. For example, Screamin’ Sicilian’s Thin & Crispy Pepperoni would work well with a crisp pilsner, while the vegetable-heavy Supremus Maximus would go with an orange wine—a bit of tang to balance all the toppings.
Finish With A Pizza-Themed Sweets Table
There’s always a place for something sweet, and you can still keep up the pizza theme by creating a dessert table filled with pizza-related desserts, like a DIY chocolate pizza with store-bought crust, chocolate-hazelnut spread in place of sauce, and bananas in place of cheese. Dust it with powdered sugar and voila: a pizza dessert!