Take N Bake Pizza

Hey everyone

Our pizzeria is looking to add “Take N Bake” Pizzas to our menu. However, I’ve been online searching for a start up kit or information on it and it seems as though this is something that is underwraps (Or I just don’t know where to look…)

Has anyone been through this or does anyone know where I could find further information to help us start??

Thanks!!
Linds

Hi,
Welcome to the think tank. There is a lot of info here. Use the search option. I added Take-N-Bake to my pizzeria last April. They added around 5% to our sales. My process is different then normal because my dough is unlike anything out there. We had to freeze our tnb and sell them that way.

The one thing I would recommend is to contact your food inspector and get info from them about what you need to do to be compliant with the law.

Hey Linds is there any specific areas you arent sure about? I’ve spent the past 6 months researching it in detail and im very nearly ready to start selling. I got a lot of help on this board actually so its definately a good starting point. I’m selling pizzas to local stores instead of my own pizza takeaway so i had a lot of hoops to jump through for the local health department. We had to carry out a lot of testing in food labs to determine the exact shelf life of the different pizzas we are going to sell. For a very basic setup you can do it quite cheaply. I purchased a machine that seals and shrink wraps all in one small unit. It has allowed me to get a shelf life of about 7 days on my pizzas. The pizzas are chilled not frozen. I think the public has a higher perception of quality with a chilled pizza than a frozen one. Thats just my opinion so im sure you’ll have a range of view on that particular subject. The only real difference is you pizza base. You need to kill the yeast in the dough to stop it from continuing to ferment. To do this you need to parbake the rolled out skin in the oven to a temperature of about 140 degrees f. We do this on screens then take the pizza out still on the screen and place them on wire racks to cool. I’ll post up a link below of the shrink wrap machine i use. Im based in the UK but im sure there are several suppliers of similar machines near to you. Just google shrink wrap machines.

http://www.minipacktorre.co.uk/machine/galaxy-food-semi-automatic-thermoshrinker.aspx

I’ve got some detailed formulas and procedured posted in the RECIPE BANK. Please take a look and let me know if you have any questions.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor