parbaked crust

Thank you for your time. I’ve been experimenting for a year and am frustrated. I’ve run into a wall. Our pizza is gaining popularity extremely fast in our area. We have many requests for our pizzas to be sold at other places so we are selling them frozen. Understanding we are going to lose some quality, I’ve have tried unsuccessfully to mimic our crust quality. Our kitchen is so small we buy the frozen dough balls. We tried buying parbaked crusts just for the frozens but they were terrible. We currently press our dough and run it through the oven for about 2 minutes before building the pizza so the crust is stiff enough to move the cardboard and then eventually into the oven at its new destination. But the final result ends in a chewy crust. Not cripsy or doughy. I’ve tried less dough and I’ve tried baking it for 4 minutes and to no avail. Do you have any ideas?

Thank you,

Nate

no offense - you’re basically serving cr@p!

the dough is not baked @ 2 minutes…

if your store is as small as you say it is, you may be exceeding its capabilities, regardless how popular you are becoming…

go back to your business plan - did it include a wholesale operational side at this time?

don’t rush & loose the quality you’ve built up…

wholesale biz takes a bit of space - making your own dough is a good start…

you might have a better product if you used quite warm dough, pressed/docked it & let it proof on a rack, under plastic…

depending on your oven config, bake @ a lower temp for a longer time - you need 2 bake the crust thru & thru - you can defrost dough, press it, speed bake it 4 2 min & refreeze it - that’ll never work!

Hi Namoquin:

I hope you are conforming to the rules and regulations involved in providing food products for resale.

Even if you do, you have your neck out a mile when you have some one else selling your product.

You have no control over the product but you will be liable for any bad result from the consumption of you product.

George Mills

I’m guessing that the short, 2-minute bake time is killing most, if not all of the yeast but not setting the crust structure sufficiently to hold the weight of the toppings, as a result, the dough gets compressed by the weight of the toppings, and it can’t recover due to the dead yeast. If you just want to get the dough skin so it will slide off of te cardboard, then you can probably set the bake time for something like a minute with a temperature of 250 to 300F (air impingement oven) to develop a dry bottom skin surface. This should be a lot easier on the yeast, allowing the dough to recover (rise) to some extent when given the final bake. This recovery will allow for better bake-out of the crust, producing a firmer, crispier finished crust characteristic.Take heed of George Mills words of caution too.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor