Dan;
Have you ever bought a pizza from the supermarket, not a bake to rise type, but one of those that you put into a hot oven and presto…15-minutes later you have a…well, a pizza of some sort ready to eat? Remember that wonderful crust characteristic that that pizza had? Something akin to a piece of cardboard. Those wonderful taxtural characteristics are, to a great extent, the result of holding the par-baked crusts for a week or more under refrigeration until they are topped/dressed, frozen and packaged To answer your question, yes, you can store the parbaked crusts in the cooler, at the risk of imparting that same wonderful textural characteristic. The best advice I can personally offer is to say "try it to see if the flavor and texture of the finished crust (as a pizza) is something you can live with or not. There are things that you can add to the dough formula to impart up to 15-days or more of mold free shelf life at room temperature (calcium propionate) aka MYCOBAN, when used at 0.25% it will give you 10 to 15-days of mold free shelf life under most conditions, and at 0.5% you might expect to see that time increase by another week or so. If you decide to go this route, be sure to test it firs to see how your customers respond to the flavor imparted by the calcium propionate. What does calcium propionate smell like? Smell an English Muffin. The calcium propionate is used at such a high level in this product that it has becone the recognized taste and aroma for an English Muffin.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor
