ordering pizza

[Jack]

Very rarely do I order pizza.

Today, I ordered pizza from one of the national chains (Papa John's). It was the first time I had ordered from this place, and I had a rather specific order (extra-this, no that, a tiny amount of this). The man on the phone said, "Thank you, Sir, your order will be there in 30 minutes."

"Thirty minutes isn't very long to have to make a pizza," I thought to myself.

A knock on my door came fewer than 25 minutes later, with my food, piping hot and delicious.

How do they do it so fast?

[Joseph E. Smith]

How do they do it so fast?

They're telepathic.

[Jack]

How do they do it so fast?

They're telepathic.

Oh! That makes so much sense. Thank you!

[Nanohedron]

It's not really pizza.

[Bloomfield]

How do they do it so fast?

If only we knew whether the Pyramids of Güímar are really alien space ports, I am sure we could find the answer to this puzzler.

[Jack]

It's not really pizza.

For my intents and purposes (or intensive purposes), it is.

[Jack]

How do they do it so fast?

If only we knew whether the Pyramids of Güímar are really alien space ports, I am sure we could find the answer to this puzzler.

But JES successfully solved the question already.

[Nanohedron]

It's not really pizza.

For my intents and purposes (or intensive purposes), it is.

Yeah, I know. Me, too.

30 minutes, though...if ever you get the really traditional pizzas cooked in woodfired brick ovens, they cook up in something like 9 minutes. Go figure.

[Jack]

Well...I have made pizzas by myself before, and this may simply be a bad reflection on my cook-skills, but it takes me more than an hour to make something edible.

[peeplj]

They use very hot pizza ovens which can cook up one a pizza much faster than your oven can at home.

Of course, their ovens only work for pizza and things made out of pizza dough. Your oven at home can cook anything.

--James

[s1m0n]

The short answer is 1) by toasting instead of baking the pizza, and 2) by switching to a substitute cheese product that melts faster.

The traditional mode of cooking a pizza is on a flat stone-floored oven, ideally wood fired. You shovel p[izzas in and out with those long-handled wooden paddles. Today, the big chains use a new design; a flat steel-mesh conveyer belt that carries the pizza across hot coils, like a toaster. It's faster, because the bottom and top are both cooked with radiant heat. Trad pizzas were cooked with conducted heat (throught the marble slab) on the bottom, and by the hot oven air on top; these are both less efficient (ie, slower) methods of heating things.

To make it work, the new pizzas need to be quite thin in terms of crust, and they require a different kind of cheese. Old cheese was mozzarella, which would arrive at the kitchen in bricks and get grated there. They don't use that any longer. Today the 'cheese' comes in boxes in a granulated form; it's more like powder than cheese or grated cheese. No idea what's in it, but I doubt it's pure cheese. They also use less of it than some old-skool pizzarias.

[Redwolf]

I've worked in a couple of fast-food places (including a pizza place) and the secret is advance preparation. We were in there two hours before opening making dough and dividing it into appropriate-sized balls for the different sizes of pizza and rolling it out, grating cheese (and yes, it was real mozzarella), making sauce and stocking the cold table with ingredients. Call comes in, you pull out the appropriate crust, slap the ingredients on it (takes a minute, tops) put it in the oven (9-10 minutes) then out the door it goes.

Some chains have even less prep time, as they get their crusts already rolled out, the sauces pre-made and the cheese (yes, real cheese) pre-grated from a central factory.

I don't know which places you're thinking of that use a powdered cheese...I've stood and watched as my pizzas were made at Round Table and Pizza Hut, and it's definitely ordinary grated mozzarella they're using. In fact, most of the chains advertise that they use "whole milk mozzarella," which means they can't legally use any kind of artificial "cheese" product.

It's very different from making a pizza at home, primarily because at home, you're not going to have all the ingredients ready to hand and the oven pre-heated and ready to go. All the work the restaurant spent before opening, you'll likely do right before you want your pizza, so of course it's going to take longer.

The limiting factor, really, isn't how fast it is to get the pizza out the door, it's how quickly the driver can get it to you. I'm surprised that Papa John's still guarantees 30 minute delivery. Domino's stopped doing it ages ago, because the guarantee they offered (30 minutes or it's free) was causing the drivers to take dangerous risks.

Redwolf

[djm]

Redwolf has it nailed, as far as I know. Lots of prep, and an entire assembly line designed to do nothing but bang through as many pizzas possible in the shortest amount of time.

I have never seen anybody use powdered pseudo-cheese, as s1m0n suggests. I use Pizza Hut (and nothing but) and it is all real mozzarella and parmesian cheese.

Definitely the cheeses used are softer than the old days. They are not stringy like the older style cheeses, and somewhat mushy if the toppings are at all acidic, like using whole tomatoes. I prefer the old, hard-style cheeses, myself.

djm

[Flyingcursor]

Powdered cheese? No way. I am a big fan of pizza and would never endure such slipshod methods.

[s1m0n]

Powdered cheese? No way. I am a big fan of pizza and would never endure such slipshod methods.

The product I'm talking about may well be cheese, but it clearly has a much lower moisture content than regular mozzarella, which speeds the cooking/melting process. When you do that to parmesan, it gets somewhere between granular and powdery, as well.