What cheese weights would you recommend using on 8",12",14" and 16" pizzas? what about for x-tra cheese?
For a 12-inch pizza I normally use 7-ounces of cheese, unless I’m using a fresh Mozzarella, and in that case I peel it and go with only 4-ounces. Since a 12-inch pizza has 113 square inches of surface area, 7 divided by 113 = 0.06194-ounces of cheese per square inch.
8" = 50.24 X 0.06194 = 3.11-ounces
12" 7-ounces
14" = 154 X 0.06194 = 9.53-ounces
16" = 201 X 0.06914 = 12.45-ounces
You can do your dough weights and sauce weights this way too. The thing to remember though is to use the amount of cheese that YOUR customers can relate to as a quality product. Experiment a little to find out what that amount is, then divide the amount by the surface area of the pizza you used for the testing and you will get the cheese loading per square inch of surface area. Now, all you need to do is to calculate the surface area of any other size you want to make and multiply that surface ares (in square inches) by YOUR cheese loading factor and you will have the amount of cheese needed for that size pizza.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor
Do you measure all ingredients in a similar manner? Or mainly cheese and dough?
I believe you indicated in other posts that you are getting into a franchise operation. The franchise will have a system for your people to use, probably by using weight or using various size scoops ladles or spoodles. We measure sauce and cheese by weight. I know I talked to one franchise operator that said that they free throw cheese and an experienced person shouldn’t need a scale. I know I can estimate the cheese correctly, I would not want to bet my money that all of my employees can. I can not speak for other operations, but we do not measure most of the toppings, we have photos to show the cooks about how much stuff should be on top of a pizza, it’s a thing you have to have an eye for. As the price of all of our toppings go up, it may be worth looking at various sized scoops for them.
Rick
I use it mainly for cheese, dough and sauce weights.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor
Yeah, the sliced and crumbled things with odd and varying shapes and sizes are often times more about coverage and flavor profile in our shop. Our process is to weight that dough/sauce/cheese and then use the prescribed amount of toppings. I played with each one to find out how to get the best coverage for the buck.
It turns out that each ingredient was about the same weight for a given size, give or take a quarter ounce, so we use standards for each size rather than each ingredient/size with fractional ounces. I price for the full ounce weight and move on. A couple of the really strong flavored foods (feta/bacon/garlic) have different weights.
Example: 2 oz of each on our 12" pizza. Seemed low at first, but customers perceive it as acceptable and a value for the quality.