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Chicken Topping - Conveyor

C

Crusher

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I am paying way too much for pre-cooked chicken breast topping. Are any of you making your own in a conveyor oven? If so, is it worth the hassle?
 
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I buy a 40# case ($1.45/1.65#) of chicken tenderloins (random boneless breasts are cheaper, but I also feature a fried tenderloin product)

We toss 10# @ a time in a garlic/spice mixture & lay 'em out flat on parchment paper/sheet pan…

We season the top with another seasoning mix…2X thru the conveyor…6.5 min @ 465…you can flip or not…we don’t as it browns a bit better…

Let 'em rest for 10 mintes to ‘finish’ cooking…chill & dice…poly bag if you need, but we go thru 10# every few days…
 
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That sounds great. I am using Burke Garlic Fajita strips now, so this should work good.
 
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We use fully cooked mesquite grilled chicken breast from pierce. We charge double topping price for it.

We take the chicken and run them through the mushroom slicer twice. Portion is about 4oz on a large pie. Taste is great. Not cheap but price is not everything.

Food reps have tried to get us to look at other products a number of times over the years. Never found another one we liked.

We used to cook our own wings. Cost savings was not even close to worth it. 1st of all, savings is not what it looks like per pound after you cook down chicken. 2nd: added waste, 3rd: other ingredients cost too, 4th: doubled the frequency of having pump out the grease trap, 5th: don’t forget the added labor cost in prep.

We use about 50 lbs of chicken breast per week in the high season. If we switched to an uncooked breast, we add all the food safety issues, have to start with about 70-80 lbs to end up with 50, would take a couple of hours of labor per week to fool around with it. No thanks! Grease trap cleaning costs $150 each time which would be $600 additional per year.
 
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We’re pretty similar to what Patriot is doing. We’re using a random bre*st we buy at $1.46 currently. We have a flat top so we do brown them off a bit, however we’ve also run them twice through the oven on occasion with good results as well. Currently we simply give them a shake of seasoned salt. Cooled, sliced or diced, bagged up and chilled. Easy and very cost effective as it takes “no time” to run it through. Like Bodega, we’ll go through 50-60 pounds of bird each week, but we do a tremendous number of pastas, and what we call a quesadilla wrap. I suppose about 1/2 of that is on our pizza line. We get comments that our chicken looks and tastes “real” compared to the strips used at our local competition so I guess we’re doing something right.
 
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We run through maybe 10-15 pounds (cooked weight) of wings per day in high season. We prepped them every 3 days or so. It would take one guy about two hours to deal with 75 pounds of wings (cooks down to 45-50 pounds), seasoning, running through the oven, cooling down etc. The extra grease in the dishwashing was substantial. Labor cost alone was about 75 cents per pound. The wings were great, but the investment in prep time and the net minimal cost savings was not worth it to us. The added grease trap cleanings iced it for me. We now use a fully cooked “rotisserie” cooked wing that comes out really nicely from the oven. They are huge. An order for a dozen weighs a full pound+ cooked.

With chicken breasts, I don’t know where we would find the mesquite flavor we have been doing now for 11+ years. It is expensive at $5.40 per pound. Portion cost comes to $1.35 on a 16" but people love it and the nationals have nothing close in quality. We charge a double topping price for it so we get $3.40 on the pizza. Not great, not terrible. Well balanced, costwise by the onions, green peppers, jalapenos, tomatoes etc that typically accompany it.

I guess this is a long winded way of saying price is not everything. If you can get a product you really like either by low cost and adding prep or buying it ready, the quality is worth paying or working for if your customer notices and appreciates the difference. When the food reps have tried to sell us lower price options for the chicken, it has never been a product we would have been proud to use.
 
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HA!!!

I’m getting a kick out of watching the automatic censor on this board block out “reas” in chicken breast! :lol:

But then again, I’m sure the automatic censor is programmed to know about Rule 34 on these interwebs.

I don’t go through a whole lot of chicken at our shop, since we’re just getting rolling. What I do use, and people keep coming back for, is Tyson Mesquite Smoked Chicken Breasts. (I guess if you put an ‘s’ on the end of breast, the censor lets it go) whichworks out to about 4.15 a pound. I dice it up into 1/2" cubes while it’s frozen. I love the flavor of the stuff. When I start selling a lot more, I’ll probably begin to look for a cheaper alternative.
 
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I’ll have to look into the Tyson breasts. That would be a nice cost savings over what we pay for the Pierce product. Rather than dicing, we run them through the slicer twice. That produces a nice topping product more like a shredded meat than dice.
 
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Crusher:
$3.89 a pound!
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Remember that your raw chicken products probably shrink somehwere around 30% to 40% depending on water retention practices. If you pay $2.50 for fresh, raw . . . . then expect to be paying closer to 3.75/lb for cooked and useable chicken product, then add spicing and labor. Pre-cooked is not such an all-fired expensive alternative when you think of price.

The ability to serve fresh cooked, and flexibility of style and seasoning, control of the base chicken product and sodium content, and local sustainability are all different matters that could enter the equation somewhere. Price isn’t as big a deal when you work it down to how much actually gets chopped and topped.
 
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if we’re mostly using fully cooked products, I reckon we should also use fully prepared pizza sauce with no added seasoning…par-baked crusts…pre-shredded cheese…fresh/frozen veggies…

a little tongue-in-cheek…

Fresh uniquely prepared products separate us from the ‘pizza pack’ of bland pizzas!!!

@ $1.59/lb, no sodium bath and shrinkage less that 10% I can sell tasty chicken toppings w/o gouging the customer…

My specialty chicken pizzas are quite popular and are competitively priced…

There is a place for prepared products…everyone has to determine/draw the line in what works for them…

For me, its taste with regard to cost…tho I chose a higher priced tomato product (Stanislaus) based on taste…
 
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Well, I have to agree with bodegahwy, the cost and headache associated with raw chicken is wow…I use a product that I just really love, its DICED chicken breast from Brakebush, Fully cooked and tastes great…10lbs at 31.45
 
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Patriot, not sure what you are comparing to but my experience was that prep on raw chicken, added grease trap cleanings etc amounted to most if not all of that savings. I am also not at all sure I could prepare something that I like as well or works as well as the cooked product we use.

We all make choices about cost every day. Certainly we debate that exact issue with Grande pretty much once a week where the difference for me would be at least 20X what it is with chicken! On that one, I choose to save the money. If I did not think after 12 years of doing this that I could charge double topping price for our chicken I would agree with you, but my experience has been that the customer likes and will pay for the product we use.
 
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$31.45/10# of product was the figure I swiped from mid-air…

Grease trap costs? We bake on a sheet pan w/silicone paper, disposed & scraped into the trash…

Oven Cleaning? Since we’ve ‘tweaked’ our MM360’s, very little debris his the ‘deck’ & we just pull the fingers once/month & spray down with that Eco Lab stuff from Sam’s - works GREAT…

We do our wings in a similar fashion…oven par-baking wings saves us fryer grease as well…we do finish them in the fryer tho…older grease from the chicken tender fryer…we run 4 fryers…

There is no right or wrong way - just the one that works for you…

We prefer to do more ‘scratch’ cooking (we even smoke some stuff) but we do a fair amout of buy-outs as well…

Our food costs are low, considering we more price sensitive but I just prefer a specific taste profile (mine! - lol)

We cook our own Italian sausage, meatballs etc. but would never think of making our own pepperoni or grinding/blending the sausage (but have thought about grinding our own burgers…just not enough volume 4 that yet…)

Yes, there are health issues with ANY raw product, but that’s why I get the BIG bucks (I wish) to keep the kitchen clean & professional.

We’re fortunate to have a big kitchen & space to do these things…other shops I’ve had - not so much raw products…

Ya have to work with what you have…

Pe@ce
 
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Patriot'sPizza:
@ $1.59/lb, no sodium bath and shrinkage less that 10% I can sell tasty chicken toppings w/o gouging the customer…
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Anyone else getting less than 10% shrinkage on fresh, raw chicken breasts products? Every 40# fresh product I buy has a statement that up to 3% solution is included, and I lose about 3/4 lb off the bat in liquid in the bottom of the bag. That’s before cooking, so I know that before I even open the case, I am looking at 1.25 lbs loss. Losing less than 4# in cooking a boneless product seems uncommon in my experiences.

Maybe I am misunderstanding . . . and you are talking about prep weight an not final cooked weight on cut pizza.
 
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I don’t buy sodium soaked tenders…hate the taste & hate paying for the additional water/solution…

I use tenders, not brst meat, hence no skin…not much purge since its not marinated…

Even if it were 20% loss, the price advantage is still with me…

Even when I use the modded smoker smoker, I just barely hit a 20% shrinkage…
 
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