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Menu Development
2012 July: Motor City Magic
When it comes to pizza, what do three major Midwest cities — Detroit, Chicago and St. Louis –– have in common? They each have a unique and especially delicious style of pizza. While Chicago’s deep-dish and St. Louis’s Pr...
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Menu Development
Succulent Scampi
Elevate menus with this easy-to-prepare add-on According to John F. Mariani’s Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink, scampi is a Venetian term that dates back to the 1920s. It refers to shrimp cooked in butter, white wine and lemon juice –– b...
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Menu Development
2012 August: Pinwheels Chef Jeff
What do you do with all that dough? A delectable option is pinwheels. The filling choices to roll in are abundant. Watch Chef Jeff Freehof, owner of The Garlic Clove in Evans Georgia, show you how to make pinwheels: To view more instructional videos,...
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Menu Development
Summer Season
Use summer ingredients to lighten up your menu As the temperature rises, it’s time to cool things down. Give your customers the opportunity to lighten up with pizzas that are fresh, colorful and deliciously summer-fresh. There’s no need to put pe...
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Menu Development
So Cool
Make this summer sweet with gelato Gelato –– that dense, creamy, wonderful Italian frozen dessert –– is not the exotic, foreign entity it once was. But although it has found its way onto restaurant menus across the country, it still offers me...
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Menu Development
Ask Big Dave: Help — Our Oven Died
Q: On the busiest Friday night ever our pizza oven died. It became completely inoperable. We lost tons of business and many of our customers left disappointed and probably visited our competition to get their pizza that night. We are trying to figure...
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Menu Development
Dough Doctor: Express a dough formula in baker’s percentage
Why are pizza dough recipes/formulas expressed in percentages rather than in amounts? The easiest way to express a dough formula is in what is referred to as baker’s percent. The amount of each ingredient is expressed as a percent of the total flou...
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Menu Development
Dress It Up
Make your own salad dressings to up the wow factor in-house There are two times of the year that salad sales in restaurants spike. The first spike is a short-lived one, and that’s the first week in January when people are making their New Year’s ...
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Menu Development
Go Green
Fun and flavorful salads heat up summer profits With the summer months upon us crisp, cold salads are a must-have menu item. “When it’s hot outside, salads are one of my favorite foods to eat,” says Spencer Johnston, executive chef at The Churc...
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Menu Development
Sauces — Beyond Red
Artisan sauces take pizza menus beyond the red sauce At the dawn of the pizza age, tomato sauce –– or crushed plum tomatoes –– was what a customer would expect to find on the pie that was put before them. Over time, though, it was simp...
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Menu Development
The Dough Doctor examines ovens’ effects on dough
An interesting question came across my desk asking how the physical attributes of an artisan pizza would be affected by baking the same pizza in different types of ovens. Let’s take a look and see how a New York-style thin-crust pizza might vary wh...
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Menu Development
Pizza Toppings: Garden Fresh
Think outside the tomato when it comes to fresh veggies on pizza Artisan pizza is booming right now thanks to an influx of upscale ingredients that are more readily available than ever before. One of the latest trends which I believe is here t...