is there a conveyor oven that has 2 temp settings for top and bottom?

Pizza Shop Talk The Think Tank
1

i could be halusinating, but i think i saw one somewhere and now cant find it… so im looking for a conveyor pizza oven in which i could have higher temperature air flow going into disc the pizza is sitting on and therefore creating crispier crust and not as hi temp air cooking pizza on top. i am also wondering if anyone here rolls there pizza and cooks inside conveyor/impegment oven… i m not big fan of handtossing, how do you implement roller to make your life easier? in perfect world i would just do few passes thru roller then trim extra to make somewhat even circle then flip on disc and put to cook. anyone doing it this way? at what point you cut the dough, right on disc or cut first and then put on disc? can someone also tell me whats the difference between older conveyor pizza oven and newer impegment one besides its being little more energy efficient, especially in terms of cooking the bottom of pie… thank you everyone who chooses to chip in…

2

We use a PS360 double stack by Middleby…it’s a great oven, especially if you do delivery and/or are a high volume pizzeria. The ovens can have different time/temp settings, so your bottom oven can run at one time and temp while the top runs at something different. If you have a single stack oven there is only one time and temp setting.

We use a sommerset dough roller (good product, not great), and then put the dough skin on the disc and trim using a pizza cutter (there should be very little to trim).

3

Air impingement ovens can direct greater heat to the bottom of the pizzas by using lower fingers with more air holes.
George Mills

4

Also, time and temp affects the top and bottom differently.
I know what you are after, Boston, because I was, too.
I can tell you that- without starting an argument or heated discussion- you won’t get it in a conveyor.

5

I know where this is going and you’re right. Conveyor ovens will not produce as quality of a bake as other ovens. If you’re looking for a crisy crust - particularly if you do thin crust - conveyor is not the way to go.

Our oven works great for what we do, but it isn’t capable of producing certain types of pizza (i.e. a crispy thin crust). It just depends on your business model and what type of pizza you’re trying to create.

What you can do, and we do for ourselves, is pre-bake the crust the crust for a few minutes before applying sauce, cheese, toppings. That will make a crispier thin crust, but we don’t offer it to our customers because we simply don’t have time on a busy night to do that.

6

I wrote an article on the different types of ovens some time back if anyone wants to dig through my archived articles to find it.
Every oven has its own strengths and weaknesses, knowing what those strengths and weaknesses are and matching them to your business model will go a very long ways in helping decide what type of oven is best for your specific application. When it comes to air impingement ovens George is absolutely correct and I might add that the biggest issue I see on a regular basis is someone buying a used air impingement “pizza” oven. I say “pizza” because it might look like a “pizza” oven but who is to say that it’s a pizza oven? I have personally seen air impingement ovens with proprietary finger profiles for baking fish (a refugee from a major seafood restaurant chain) sold as a “pizza” oven. About as close to a “pizza” oven as that oven would come would be that it looked just like a “pizza” oven, and no, it sure didn’t bake a pizza like a “pizza” oven because inside it was a fish oven. Then too we have the case where an oven has a custom finger profile designed to meet a customer’s specific needs for baking THEIR pizzas, then the ovens end up being sold as a used pizza oven…yes it was used to bake pizzas BUT those pizzas required a special baking profile which in all probability will not be correct for your pizza. It is this last issue that has both good news and bad news, the bad news is the scenario as described above, the good news is that you can change the airflow profile to the top or bottom or both to achieve a specific bake to your pizzas, additionally, you can also change the baking platform to further achieve different baking characteristics or enhance different characteristics. The point is that these ovens are extremely versatile and very few operators really know or understand just how versatile they can be…after all, it’s just a pizza oven…isn’t it?
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor