That's not necessarily a bad idea but it is unusual. It's probably to be sure the dough is being cooked through enough. Post cutting is the way to go, a pizza will keep cooking out of the oven until it cools down enough so taking the temp at that time makes more sense.
Also lemme know if you have any pizza cook related questions or issues. I work at a pretty high end pizza spot, high enough all the stuff is made from scratch and made well, not so high end that it's bullshit bougie food. If I don't know it, our chef probably does, once he found out he was stuck in a pizza job he did his pizza research and like, has gone out of countries for pizza making contests. Also I've been a cook for like 13 years now and know how things normally work (in Canada at least)
I appreciate the offer of advice but I think i'm good for the most part, mmy main difficulty right now is figuring out how busy it's going to be and figuring out new pizzas when I get two contradictory recipes. And the oven doesn't fucking cook evenly or consistently so I keep having to rotate pizzas halfway through + give random extra time to cook the cheese so that it isn't so runny. I'm pretty sure there's something wrong with it because the pastry oven they had me use when it gave me an error had the same settings but like, 7 minutes in that oven was like 11 minutes in mine
One question though, what governs how greasy a pizza is? It seems like I'll go light on cheese and ingredients and still sometimes get a greasy fucking pizza. Is it the sauce?
Also does a stromboli cover the ENTIRE dough in ingredients before rolling, or just half like a calzone? I was told the opposite things... by the same person :agony-deep: but google shows ingredients on the whole dough
Grease probably isn't from the sauce, it's generally mostly from meat and some from the cheese. Pepperoni is just greasy af and the pizza will be greasy. Otherwise, it might be the cheese if it's crappy cheese but that's my best guess.
Ingredients usually are placed on the whole dough with some room around the edges. But really it doesn't matter if the end result is the same.
Pizza ovens usually don't cook even and need to be rotated at least once while cooking, that's normal though it does sound like your oven kinda sucks. What temperature is it normally at? We run ours around 650. If you wanna do a fast blast to finish the cheese, lift the pizza up with the paddle near the center of the oven and hold it up there for a few seconds, heat rising will finish the cheese.
I think some of it is from the sauce because I tend to see big orange clumps of what could only be fat when I scoop it out, I generally try to dump those out though
Ingredients usually are placed on the whole dough with some room around the edges. But really it doesn’t matter if the end result is the same.
I think I'm going to do my strombolis with ingredients on the whole pizza because I think that's what it's supposed to be. Technically the end results wouldn't be the same because it changes the ratio of ingredients and sauce to dough, ya know? but hopefully I won't have to make them very often. These college kids love strombolis for some reason so I always have to make a shitload and it's a pain when I get sauce on my fingers rolling the edges and feel like I need to change gloves before I get sauce on everything
Pizza ovens usually don’t cook even and need to be rotated at least once while cooking, that’s normal though it does sound like your oven kinda sucks. What temperature is it normally at? We run ours around 650. If you wanna do a fast blast to finish the cheese, lift the pizza up with the paddle near the center of the oven and hold it up there for a few seconds, heat rising will finish the cheese.
The temp in our oven is definitely not that high, it's set to 480 but with how it compares to the pastry oven I'm thinking there's an issue with the thermostat or the convection part or both and that's why it's inconsistent. Like the pastry oven is almost identical, also set to 480, it's just smaller. But again, it cooks like 4 minutes faster and all evenly without rotation
The rotating isn't so bad but like, the top rack (of 14) is significantly hotter, like a broiler effect, so the top pizza (I cook cheese at the top so pork drippings don't get on it, there's a lot of people who don't eat pork) will cook perfectly with one rotation, and then I have to play this complicated game of musical chairs trying to use that effect with the rest of the pizzas as they cook another 3-4 minutes, further complicated by the varying moisture content of the pizzas (i.e. they have me do pizzas sometimes with no sauce, just brush with oil filled with minced garlic and herbs (the recipes will usually say to use an aioli, lol) and those cook a lot faster and more evenly as a result)
it's kind of annoying that the pastry oven worked so much better, the big boss director guy said something about moving it over as a joke and like for real I want that oven
edit: this oven definitely needs maintenance imo like when I started the fucking seal around the door was broken and it would leak water everywhere while cleaning itself, how do you not notice that shit, it had a SIX INCH GAP MISSING! right where steam would shoot out while cleaning!, now it's been giving me issues with the "wiring compartment temp too high" and apparently it's because a little fan underneath part of it was getting clogged, and I got told to wipe it down with a damp cloth but like. This gunk on it it sticky, I got what I could off mechanically picking it it but it needs like a solvent and some Q-tips to get up in there. I kept telling the supervisor that it needs something other than water but he was like :shrug-outta-hecks: and idk if I should mention it to the Director Guy or just leave it
Ah, I've never worked with that kind of oven. Ours is old school giant hunk of stone and 3 very powerful propane burners.
For the cleaning, try a degreaser if you have one for the sticky bits. It sounds for sure like it needs maintenance which is always worth bringing up.
No sauce oil pizzas will cook way better because oil distributes the hear evenly over the surface where cooking something dry it'll be more focused towards whatever is pointing at the heat. And pizza sauce is wet as fuck which slows the cooking down.
Edit: marinara should NOT be greasy. It's tomatoes and spices.
Ah, I’ve never worked with that kind of oven. Ours is old school giant hunk of stone and 3 very powerful propane burners
I think it's some kind of gas oven, but I'm not sure, I keep intending to ask about it but forget. It has some sort of "boiler" that needs "flushing" which... uh... is apparently triggered by smoke on the inside, to a degree, because I might have forgotten a pizza for too long and then it was like "boiler needs flushing dude" for like 30 minutes. Thankfully nobody saw my shame as I threw away that charred pizza
For the cleaning, try a degreaser if you have one for the sticky bits.
We've got a degreaser called "orange force" or something, I wasn't sure if I should use that or try dabbing a bit of the oven cleaner that the oven uses, which I assume to be a much stronger cleaning agent with how I was warned to not get it on my hands, wipe a bit with that, and then wipe it off with a damp cloth. The degreaser has kind of a surfactant effect and bubbles, idk if the oven cleaner does, but I was thinking that might be a reason I wasn't told to use the degreaser in the first place. The supervisor seemed paranoid about damaging the fan but also unsure in general how to deal with it.
but like whatever is used to clean it it needs like some internal cleaning, at least to like a "q-tips or pipe cleaners degree." I guess I'll mention it to the big boss next time I see him
No sauce oil pizzas will cook way better because oil distributes the hear evenly over the surface where cooking something dry it’ll be more focused towards whatever is pointing at the heat. And pizza sauce is wet as fuck which slows the cooking down.
Yeah I think it's mostly the moisture content that makes them cook so much more quickly, I've noticed cheese and sauce both add cook time depending on how much. One of my coworkers makes the cheesiest fucking cheese pizzas and I keep forgetting to ask him to tone it down, I hate cooking his goddamn pizzas. Especially because I like to convert old cheese pizzas to pepperoni to save time and ensure everything old gets used ASAP, I get these pepperoni cheese oceans
Edit: marinara should NOT be greasy. It’s tomatoes and spices.
Our sauce is 6Ib cans of "fully prepared pizza sauce" with a brand name starting with a P which I can't remember and which doesn't come up on google. Basically I take 3 of those cans, dump them in a tub, then add like 1/4th a can full of water to lower the viscosity. I think they just changed to this brand because the first day I started they had another, I was specifically told this other one needed water, and I haven't seen a can of the other brand ever since, lol.
I know the can says "fully prepared" but I keep thinking like... Maybe it needs to be reheated and cooked a little, because it has these big orange chunks in it, to melt and redistribute all of that, but idk. Honestly even if it did... I don't think I want to put all that effort in. I want to make a good pizza and I really like it when I get like, a really aesthetically pleasing pizza and the other cooks tell me it was good, but that would take a lot of time.
I might put the effort in if they have me do more of today's pizza though, it was supposed to be "spicy chicken" with the recipe calling for sauteed julienned bell peppers added to "marinara sauca" with hot sauce and red chili flakes, cooked for another thirty minutes. I was told "that's stupid don't do all that" and to just take the chicken and mix it with hot wing sauce and red chili flakes. It ended up not very spicy and I think with pizza it would be better to have the spicy sauce because it would distribute it over the whole pizza instead of just the spicy chicken bits? But I could also just make the chicken spicier in the future. The guy who trained me basically gave me an almost used jug of wing sauce and said "use all of that" and I trusted that measurement (and added like 8 dabs of hot sauce and a literal hand full of red chili flakes)
Your oven sounds all kinds of over engineered and a bit of a nightmare.
Orange Force is the shit! It's just citric acid and isn't that dangerous for your hands. I had to deal with ordering chemicals at a place and we were switching suppliers and the rep literally poured it on his bare arm to show how safe it is.
Okay, you don't make your own sauce from scratch, then yeah, it's probably greasy .
It sounds like you may work at a bit of a shitty place. That sauce as described in the recipe sounds pretty damn good and is hardly high effort to prep. I've generally worked in higher scale/more niche restaurants where things are made from scratch and cutting corners and putting out bullshit food tends to be a bad thing.
It would be a cool oven if it worked right. I like that it cleans itself and I don't have to fuck around scraping shit off. Except there's this complicated calculus that goes into determining if it's dirty enough to run a clean cycle because half the time the supervisor tells me not to and I just want it to run regularly because... that seems like good preventative maintenance? Clean it when it isn't that dirty to prevent it from becoming so dirty that it can't clean it properly? But what do I know
I think we're talking about some other Orange Force because this is some kind of other acid but mixed with surfactants. It definitely fucks up my hands. I'm sure the oven cleaner stuff is worse though, it strips the flooring tiles when the stupid fucking thing leaks water
We're not trying to put out shitty food but it's a college dining hall so that's pretty much the quality of everything
That's not necessarily a bad idea but it is unusual. It's probably to be sure the dough is being cooked through enough. Post cutting is the way to go, a pizza will keep cooking out of the oven until it cools down enough so taking the temp at that time makes more sense.
Also lemme know if you have any pizza cook related questions or issues. I work at a pretty high end pizza spot, high enough all the stuff is made from scratch and made well, not so high end that it's bullshit bougie food. If I don't know it, our chef probably does, once he found out he was stuck in a pizza job he did his pizza research and like, has gone out of countries for pizza making contests. Also I've been a cook for like 13 years now and know how things normally work (in Canada at least)
I appreciate the offer of advice but I think i'm good for the most part, mmy main difficulty right now is figuring out how busy it's going to be and figuring out new pizzas when I get two contradictory recipes. And the oven doesn't fucking cook evenly or consistently so I keep having to rotate pizzas halfway through + give random extra time to cook the cheese so that it isn't so runny. I'm pretty sure there's something wrong with it because the pastry oven they had me use when it gave me an error had the same settings but like, 7 minutes in that oven was like 11 minutes in mine
One question though, what governs how greasy a pizza is? It seems like I'll go light on cheese and ingredients and still sometimes get a greasy fucking pizza. Is it the sauce?
Also does a stromboli cover the ENTIRE dough in ingredients before rolling, or just half like a calzone? I was told the opposite things... by the same person :agony-deep: but google shows ingredients on the whole dough
Grease probably isn't from the sauce, it's generally mostly from meat and some from the cheese. Pepperoni is just greasy af and the pizza will be greasy. Otherwise, it might be the cheese if it's crappy cheese but that's my best guess.
Ingredients usually are placed on the whole dough with some room around the edges. But really it doesn't matter if the end result is the same.
Pizza ovens usually don't cook even and need to be rotated at least once while cooking, that's normal though it does sound like your oven kinda sucks. What temperature is it normally at? We run ours around 650. If you wanna do a fast blast to finish the cheese, lift the pizza up with the paddle near the center of the oven and hold it up there for a few seconds, heat rising will finish the cheese.
I think some of it is from the sauce because I tend to see big orange clumps of what could only be fat when I scoop it out, I generally try to dump those out though
I think I'm going to do my strombolis with ingredients on the whole pizza because I think that's what it's supposed to be. Technically the end results wouldn't be the same because it changes the ratio of ingredients and sauce to dough, ya know? but hopefully I won't have to make them very often. These college kids love strombolis for some reason so I always have to make a shitload and it's a pain when I get sauce on my fingers rolling the edges and feel like I need to change gloves before I get sauce on everything
The temp in our oven is definitely not that high, it's set to 480 but with how it compares to the pastry oven I'm thinking there's an issue with the thermostat or the convection part or both and that's why it's inconsistent. Like the pastry oven is almost identical, also set to 480, it's just smaller. But again, it cooks like 4 minutes faster and all evenly without rotation
The rotating isn't so bad but like, the top rack (of 14) is significantly hotter, like a broiler effect, so the top pizza (I cook cheese at the top so pork drippings don't get on it, there's a lot of people who don't eat pork) will cook perfectly with one rotation, and then I have to play this complicated game of musical chairs trying to use that effect with the rest of the pizzas as they cook another 3-4 minutes, further complicated by the varying moisture content of the pizzas (i.e. they have me do pizzas sometimes with no sauce, just brush with oil filled with minced garlic and herbs (the recipes will usually say to use an aioli, lol) and those cook a lot faster and more evenly as a result)
it's kind of annoying that the pastry oven worked so much better, the big boss director guy said something about moving it over as a joke and like for real I want that oven
edit: this oven definitely needs maintenance imo like when I started the fucking seal around the door was broken and it would leak water everywhere while cleaning itself, how do you not notice that shit, it had a SIX INCH GAP MISSING! right where steam would shoot out while cleaning!, now it's been giving me issues with the "wiring compartment temp too high" and apparently it's because a little fan underneath part of it was getting clogged, and I got told to wipe it down with a damp cloth but like. This gunk on it it sticky, I got what I could off mechanically picking it it but it needs like a solvent and some Q-tips to get up in there. I kept telling the supervisor that it needs something other than water but he was like :shrug-outta-hecks: and idk if I should mention it to the Director Guy or just leave it
Ah, I've never worked with that kind of oven. Ours is old school giant hunk of stone and 3 very powerful propane burners.
For the cleaning, try a degreaser if you have one for the sticky bits. It sounds for sure like it needs maintenance which is always worth bringing up.
No sauce oil pizzas will cook way better because oil distributes the hear evenly over the surface where cooking something dry it'll be more focused towards whatever is pointing at the heat. And pizza sauce is wet as fuck which slows the cooking down.
Edit: marinara should NOT be greasy. It's tomatoes and spices.
I think it's some kind of gas oven, but I'm not sure, I keep intending to ask about it but forget. It has some sort of "boiler" that needs "flushing" which... uh... is apparently triggered by smoke on the inside, to a degree, because I might have forgotten a pizza for too long and then it was like "boiler needs flushing dude" for like 30 minutes. Thankfully nobody saw my shame as I threw away that charred pizza
We've got a degreaser called "orange force" or something, I wasn't sure if I should use that or try dabbing a bit of the oven cleaner that the oven uses, which I assume to be a much stronger cleaning agent with how I was warned to not get it on my hands, wipe a bit with that, and then wipe it off with a damp cloth. The degreaser has kind of a surfactant effect and bubbles, idk if the oven cleaner does, but I was thinking that might be a reason I wasn't told to use the degreaser in the first place. The supervisor seemed paranoid about damaging the fan but also unsure in general how to deal with it.
but like whatever is used to clean it it needs like some internal cleaning, at least to like a "q-tips or pipe cleaners degree." I guess I'll mention it to the big boss next time I see him
Yeah I think it's mostly the moisture content that makes them cook so much more quickly, I've noticed cheese and sauce both add cook time depending on how much. One of my coworkers makes the cheesiest fucking cheese pizzas and I keep forgetting to ask him to tone it down, I hate cooking his goddamn pizzas. Especially because I like to convert old cheese pizzas to pepperoni to save time and ensure everything old gets used ASAP, I get these pepperoni cheese oceans
Our sauce is 6Ib cans of "fully prepared pizza sauce" with a brand name starting with a P which I can't remember and which doesn't come up on google. Basically I take 3 of those cans, dump them in a tub, then add like 1/4th a can full of water to lower the viscosity. I think they just changed to this brand because the first day I started they had another, I was specifically told this other one needed water, and I haven't seen a can of the other brand ever since, lol.
I know the can says "fully prepared" but I keep thinking like... Maybe it needs to be reheated and cooked a little, because it has these big orange chunks in it, to melt and redistribute all of that, but idk. Honestly even if it did... I don't think I want to put all that effort in. I want to make a good pizza and I really like it when I get like, a really aesthetically pleasing pizza and the other cooks tell me it was good, but that would take a lot of time.
I might put the effort in if they have me do more of today's pizza though, it was supposed to be "spicy chicken" with the recipe calling for sauteed julienned bell peppers added to "marinara sauca" with hot sauce and red chili flakes, cooked for another thirty minutes. I was told "that's stupid don't do all that" and to just take the chicken and mix it with hot wing sauce and red chili flakes. It ended up not very spicy and I think with pizza it would be better to have the spicy sauce because it would distribute it over the whole pizza instead of just the spicy chicken bits? But I could also just make the chicken spicier in the future. The guy who trained me basically gave me an almost used jug of wing sauce and said "use all of that" and I trusted that measurement (and added like 8 dabs of hot sauce and a literal hand full of red chili flakes)
Your oven sounds all kinds of over engineered and a bit of a nightmare.
Orange Force is the shit! It's just citric acid and isn't that dangerous for your hands. I had to deal with ordering chemicals at a place and we were switching suppliers and the rep literally poured it on his bare arm to show how safe it is.
Okay, you don't make your own sauce from scratch, then yeah, it's probably greasy .
It sounds like you may work at a bit of a shitty place. That sauce as described in the recipe sounds pretty damn good and is hardly high effort to prep. I've generally worked in higher scale/more niche restaurants where things are made from scratch and cutting corners and putting out bullshit food tends to be a bad thing.
It would be a cool oven if it worked right. I like that it cleans itself and I don't have to fuck around scraping shit off. Except there's this complicated calculus that goes into determining if it's dirty enough to run a clean cycle because half the time the supervisor tells me not to and I just want it to run regularly because... that seems like good preventative maintenance? Clean it when it isn't that dirty to prevent it from becoming so dirty that it can't clean it properly? But what do I know
I think we're talking about some other Orange Force because this is some kind of other acid but mixed with surfactants. It definitely fucks up my hands. I'm sure the oven cleaner stuff is worse though, it strips the flooring tiles when the stupid fucking thing leaks water
We're not trying to put out shitty food but it's a college dining hall so that's pretty much the quality of everything