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Menu Development
Detroit Style Pizza: A Guide to Detroit Pizza
Discover Detroit-Style Pizza Detroit style pizza is a square, deep dish pizza that is known for its racing stripes sauce on top, cheese crust crown and light crust. Whether you call them red tops or square pizza, Detroit-style pizza is a unique pizza style that hast become one of the hottest pizza styles and one […]
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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...
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 percentage. The amount of each ingredient is expressed as a percent of total flour...
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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
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
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...
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Menu Development
Ask Big Dave: Pizza for Breakfast
Q: So, I have a great breakfast pizza that I make for people who are having breakfast meetings but don’t want the same old muffins and donuts. It’s not something I have on my regular menu and I am not open for breakfast. I only do this for groups...
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Menu Development
Dough Doctor: What is ‘dough factor,’ and does mixing time really matter?
Q: I’ve heard of a thing called “dough factor.” Can you explain this to me? A: Dough factor –– also known as “dough loading” –– is used to calculate the amount of dough needed to increase or decrease a pizza’s size while keeping ...
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Menu Development
Forbidden Fruit?
Fruit pizza toppings add a whole new flavor dimension Hawaiian Pizza and its variations broke the mold years ago, combining sweet, tart pineapple with savory, salty ham to create a menu favorite across the country. While pineapple has become a mainst...
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Menu Development
Raid The Pantry
Optimize ingredients you have on hand It’s certainly important to consider and sample new items to incorporate into our menu to keep our customer base excited and interested. Although I do think it’s critical to periodically introduce new ...