What's your best selling pizza ?

Pizza Shop Talk The Think Tank
1

And whats on it ?

Ours is Combination .

Pep , saug , C.B ( canadian bacon ) , mush , onion , green pepper , black olives .

             Posted by: Paulene ( my 8 year old daughter cause she types faster) :D
2

My best seller is the Daddio’s House Special
Ham, pepperoni, bacon, black olives, green peppers, mushrooms, onions

3

Creamand.jpg
Cream & Crimson
Alfredo sauce and mozzarella cheese are blanketed with a layer of oven-roasted Red Potato seasoned with fresh garlic and dill. Topped off with Bacon, Cheddar, and creamy Gorgonzola cheese. A pizza to make even our most ardent fans stand up and cheer!

4

its a toss up between our classic Italian (Sau,Mush,On) and our house special (Smoked, chopped, Beef Brisket, Italian Sausage, Bacon & white cheddar cheese curds)

5

Mine is The Al Capone: Sausage, Bacon and Pepperoni. Basic, but it outsells my other combinations by a margin of 3:1

6

I’m wanting to add potatoes as a topping. How do you prepare yours prior to putting them on?

7

Damn, that sounds good!
I don’t think i’d ever see something like that sell here outside of our summer tourist season.
The original owners of my property tried to introduce a neo-style pizza to the Northwoods of Wisconsin 12 years ago, and their plan failed horribly. But no fault of their own, I thought their product was top shelf. The problem was in the palette of our permanent residents, They expected a typical American pie and wanted noting to do with prosciutto & artichoke hearts or fresh basil and fresh mozz on a pizza.,

8

Use a firm potato like a new red. Slice med thin. Toss with a light coating of oil and seasonings. Spread out in a pan and bake uncovered for 10 minutes* (we run through our pizza oven at 430F), turn over, bake another 10 minutes until the edges of the potatoes just begin to brown. I’d describe the texture as “al dente” when done, edible but you know you’d get a stomach ache if you ate too many. Chill and store in a tightly covered container. Put on pizza like pepperoni. Best used within 2-3 days.

potatoes.jpg

*If you make a smaller batch than we do (our pans are heaping full doing 50lbs of potatoes at once), you’ll need to cut down on the cook time - don’t want potato chips!

9

The “Big Dog” on our menu for 16 years and best seller all that time. (It is what we sell when a customers asks for “a combo”, “a deluxe” etc)

Fresh hand tossed high altitude honey pizza dough, traditional red sauce, Beef Pepperoni, Sliced Italian Sausage, Red Onions, Black Olives and Fresh Mushrooms with Mozzarella Cheese.

Big dog c.jpg

10

Depends on the store as all 3 of my shops have different “best sellers” (and when I owned my other shop, it was different too).

My campus store sells a ton of single and 2 topping pizzas. The best seller combo is The Mediterranean - Thin Crust Olive Oil & Garlic sauce lite mozz, Red Onion, Green & Black Olives, Chicken, Tomato & Feta.

My high volume residential shop sells a ton of what we call the Jackpot (or 5 pounder) which the original owners (whom I worked for marketed a lot in the 90’s) as having everything but Fish Fruit and Fire - Original Hand Tossed Pizza with traditional marinara and topped with Pepperoni, Ham, Sausage, Beef, Red Onion, Green Pepper, Black & Green Olive, Mushroom and Extra Cheese.

My low volume residential shop sells the most “Full House” - Pepperoni, Ham, Sausage, Beef and Extra Cheese.

All 3 have exact same menu!

11

Our most popular specialty is our deluxe: Pepperoni, mushroom, sausage, onion, green pepper, black & green olives. Next most is BLT: bacon and cheese (no sauce) baked then topped with lettuce, tomato and a mayo drizzle.

12

My most popular is my “Idiots Delight” Canadian bacon, Pepperoni, onions, mushroom, black olives, green peppers, ground beef. Tried posting a picture of it but it says it is too large of a file.

13

Pizzass I smoke my boston butts for 9 hours over hickory and make my own BBQ sauce been my best seller for the last 4 years

14

Ours is the “North of the border” ( Pepperoni, green chilis and cream cheese) or the “Cousin Vinny” ( Salami, pepperoni, ham, Bananna peppers, red onion and a sprinkle of Feta)

15

pepperoni followed closely by good old cheese and our house made sausage recipe that my grandfather brought over from Italy with him. It has been an experience getting people in central OH to come to a NY pie with sparse toppings. Most are use to a dumptruck full of stuff on top of their pies. I have taken it as quite a compliment to have people now saying they prefer our pies over the local stuff. Walter

http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y237/waltertore/photoshootpepperonipie_zpse643ee20.jpg
http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y237/waltertore/photoshootaddingsausage_zpsb7c55f42.jpg

16

We started offering 2 different options for pizza to meet the unique preferences of our area. My classic “Milwaukee Style” (don’t laugh if you’ve never been there) which is just a hand tossed, heavily topped, and we recently added our “Super Thin” with lesser quantities of toppings on it to appeal to the midwest cracker-crust crowd.
We use the same dough formulation, we just run a small dough ball through a sheeter to get our super-thin for a large, and back way down on toppings.
The busiest place for pizza in my area is a Monicals franchise, I believe it is nearly an 8-10 hour drive to reach the closest monicals from this one.

I’ve had to tweak almost everything in my restaurant to meet local preferences, the way I see it, you have 2 choices, we are forced to alter some things to appeal to local tastes, or we can go out of business.
The last 3 owners of this property before me have all refused to alter things.

17

I respect your choice to cater to locals and am happy you are successful. I feel with my NY pizzeria background (raised in the business at ground 0 in family run shops) our pies stand on their own anywhere in the country. The classic NY pie is what a huge % of shops profess to sell but in reality very few actually get anywhere close to getting it right. I live in the land of sheeted/docked/baked on a pan cracker crust, conveyor oven, low quality pizza land. I can’t count how many locals have said they never saw a pizza like ours who now will buy nothing but ours. The success has encouraged me that great NY pizza will sell anywhere. All my life what I have done has gone against the norm and most felt my endeavors destined to fail. So far it all has been success so I see no need to change things now. It will be a small shop with my wife, myself, and a couple people with disabilities as employees doing it old school. The pies will be the ones I love to make/eat. I have to be passionate about what I sell. No specials, cheap prices, just solid pizza. I have several friends that own shops around the country that are very successful with this approach. It all begins with a pie that is going to shine against the competition. I am continually amazed at how many people go into the pizza business that really don’t know a thing about making pizza. NY classic deck oven pizza is becoming extinct even in the NYC area. Wood fired ovens are taking over. It is a great time to be an old school, older pizza maker in the NY style. Being almost 60 and making pies for near 50 years and using 1960’s holy grail gas deck ovens is a good image thing too:) We are not aiming to get rich. Our goal is to keep true NY pizza alive and use the shop to train and employ people with disabilities so that they can find meaning in life through employment with us and other food establishments in the area. Walter

18

Smiling With Hope,
I respect your commitment,
I believe that you may have taken my previous post the wrong way by thinking that I was saying that you should change your style.

That is not the message that I was trying to convey. Instead it was more of me complaining about the local clientele that I see at my location.
I do apologize for me not being more clear and you taking offense.

I’ll use my “Steak Pizza” as an example, we sold the hell out of them in Milwaukee, it was probably our 2nd biggest biggest seller. And I can barely give the darn things away here! So I quit doing them.
Hearing that our Sausage was too spicy according to several people, so I changed that. My sauce, I had to back down on seasonings too, and hearing “Do you have a super-thin crust?” got annoying to the point where I dug a sheeter out of storage and I have the ugly, loud, monstrosity on my counter taking up space now too.
I think I realize why the other pizza places in my area suck now, because if they didn’t suck. and the differed from each other, local people wouldn’t patronize them.
Seriously, People enjoy eating Lutefisk and Cornish Pasty’s where I live! What does that tell you?

19

GotRocks: No offense taken. I ran into a brick wall here with the little Cesar’s pizza mentality of cheap ingredients, low skills needed to make the pies, 2 for ones, specials all the time, etc… It continues to be quite depressing from a food perspective in that I could never survive in this area with my own pizzeria done my way. We live 40 miles outside Columbus and it is a very rural and clannish area. People don’t travel much outside the state or even the county. The food palate here is vastly different than what I have lived in all my life. I grew up 5 miles outside NYC and have since lived in Austin TX, Brussels Belgium, SF/Sonoma County CA, and most recently central OH. In all of these areas I have worked in the bakery/pizza/bread scene and what is normal for me is vastly different here. Every other place we have lived in has been a very eclectic place with high food standards but here it is impossible to find food that matches the other places we have lived. Most of our work is contract with school districts and a university for bagels and cookies that fit the federal wellness law. Personally I don’t care for our cookies or bagels because of the ingredients we have to use to meet the contracts. It provides work for my students and keeps the program in the black. For this I get into doing it but with pizza and artisan breads I draw the line. These products we sell to the general public and the pizza gets us most of our publicity but could never sustain the program. Columbus would support my pizza I think because it has a handful of decent food establishments and a nitch population that has traveled some and knows decent food but we are wanting to move back west to where there isn’t months of ice and snow on the ground. This experience has been a wonderful one in that living here offers much in the way of affordability, safety, friendly, no traffic. It also was a great experience in living in an area for the first time that sees food completely different than what we have lived in all our life. They say location, location, location, is the most important thing with opening a shop. Up till now that has meant to me being in the right part of town. Now it means being in a city/region where food like we like is abundant. We figured up to this point that the entire country had food like we are use to. :). Walter

PS: I find your pizza/bbq concept quite the one. I worked under Stubbs down in Austin TX and consider myself quite competent in TX BBQ but combining the two is something. I take my hat off to you. Here are our non wellness breads/bagels and some BBQ ribs.

http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y237/waltertore/P1000359_zps77df3960.jpg

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20

Hats of to you sir, beautiful product.