Today, I ordered pizza from one of the national chains (Papa John’s). It was the first time I had ordered from this place, and I had a rather specific order (extra-this, no that, a tiny amount of this). The man on the phone said, “Thank you, Sir, your order will be there in 30 minutes.”
“Thirty minutes isn’t very long to have to make a pizza,” I thought to myself.
A knock on my door came fewer than 25 minutes later, with my food, piping hot and delicious.
Well…I have made pizzas by myself before, and this may simply be a bad reflection on my cook-skills, but it takes me more than an hour to make something edible.
The short answer is 1) by toasting instead of baking the pizza, and 2) by switching to a substitute cheese product that melts faster.
The traditional mode of cooking a pizza is on a flat stone-floored oven, ideally wood fired. You shovel p[izzas in and out with those long-handled wooden paddles. Today, the big chains use a new design; a flat steel-mesh conveyer belt that carries the pizza across hot coils, like a toaster. It’s faster, because the bottom and top are both cooked with radiant heat. Trad pizzas were cooked with conducted heat (throught the marble slab) on the bottom, and by the hot oven air on top; these are both less efficient (ie, slower) methods of heating things.
To make it work, the new pizzas need to be quite thin in terms of crust, and they require a different kind of cheese. Old cheese was mozzarella, which would arrive at the kitchen in bricks and get grated there. They don’t use that any longer. Today the ‘cheese’ comes in boxes in a granulated form; it’s more like powder than cheese or grated cheese. No idea what’s in it, but I doubt it’s pure cheese. They also use less of it than some old-skool pizzarias.
I’ve worked in a couple of fast-food places (including a pizza place) and the secret is advance preparation. We were in there two hours before opening making dough and dividing it into appropriate-sized balls for the different sizes of pizza and rolling it out, grating cheese (and yes, it was real mozzarella), making sauce and stocking the cold table with ingredients. Call comes in, you pull out the appropriate crust, slap the ingredients on it (takes a minute, tops) put it in the oven (9-10 minutes) then out the door it goes.
Some chains have even less prep time, as they get their crusts already rolled out, the sauces pre-made and the cheese (yes, real cheese) pre-grated from a central factory.
I don’t know which places you’re thinking of that use a powdered cheese…I’ve stood and watched as my pizzas were made at Round Table and Pizza Hut, and it’s definitely ordinary grated mozzarella they’re using. In fact, most of the chains advertise that they use “whole milk mozzarella,” which means they can’t legally use any kind of artificial “cheese” product.
It’s very different from making a pizza at home, primarily because at home, you’re not going to have all the ingredients ready to hand and the oven pre-heated and ready to go. All the work the restaurant spent before opening, you’ll likely do right before you want your pizza, so of course it’s going to take longer.
The limiting factor, really, isn’t how fast it is to get the pizza out the door, it’s how quickly the driver can get it to you. I’m surprised that Papa John’s still guarantees 30 minute delivery. Domino’s stopped doing it ages ago, because the guarantee they offered (30 minutes or it’s free) was causing the drivers to take dangerous risks.
Redwolf has it nailed, as far as I know. Lots of prep, and an entire assembly line designed to do nothing but bang through as many pizzas possible in the shortest amount of time.
I have never seen anybody use powdered pseudo-cheese, as s1m0n suggests. I use Pizza Hut (and nothing but) and it is all real mozzarella and parmesian cheese.
Definitely the cheeses used are softer than the old days. They are not stringy like the older style cheeses, and somewhat mushy if the toppings are at all acidic, like using whole tomatoes. I prefer the old, hard-style cheeses, myself.
The product I’m talking about may well be cheese, but it clearly has a much lower moisture content than regular mozzarella, which speeds the cooking/melting process. When you do that to parmesan, it gets somewhere between granular and powdery, as well.
There is a wonderful pizza place down the road a bit here in Little Rock called Shotgun Dan’s.
They use the cheese that is stringy and gooey when it melts.
They make a truly lovely pizza!
I don’t believe they do delivery, though, and when you order your pizza you have about a 30-minute wait to munch on the salad bar while they make and cook your pizza.
Bingo!
Living in Chicago you’d think we eat out or ordered pizzas all the time but no. (Actually, I think its only pizza parlor owners and tourists who rave about Chicago’s pizzas.)
We were given a “pizza stone” as a wedding present and a bread machine the next year, the rest is history.
Once the dough is made and all the rest is chopped up it takes no time at all to put a decent pizza together. We usually bake the dough first then take it out and top it.
If we don’t bury the cheese under other toppings its simply a quick melt at the very end.
We haven’t made a pizza in months though. I don’t think I’ve “fired up” the oven or stove once these past couple of months. We’ve been experimenting in the Vita-mix all summer.
That’s always been the secret, but p[izza making hasn’t always been this fast. In recent years the process suddenly got faster, particularly with the larger chains. The switch I’m talking about are what changed.
I grew up in the Pizza Triangle in Connecticut, where the sauce is homemade and the cheese is full-fat mozarella, which melts very easily. The pies are individually made, and usually arrive 15-20 minutes after ordering. As Nano said, the key is the brick oven. These cook at about 800 F. I cook my pizza at 450 and it takes 15-20 minutes depending on how thick the crust is and how many toppings are on it. At 800 degrees they cook about twice as fast, which means it takes 7-10 minutes. As Red said, they’re prepared – the ingredients are all cut up ahead of time, the dough has been rising all day (or since the night before if it’s lunch) and is divided, the sauce is cooked and always the right consistency. And the people in the joints REALLY know what they’re doing – usually people just tossing dough, and others assembling the pies – so they do it fast.
