Pizza Today - May 2022 - 26

OPERATIONS
Kitchen Ops for Deliver y I PAGE 30
By Mike Bausch
Photos Josh Keown
The Starting Lineup
Equipment choices are key to an efficient kitchen
Y
our kitchen is your money-making
zone. It needs to be highly efficient
and functional for you to be profitable.
No
kitchen is the same and deciding not
only the best equipment but the most appropriate
equipment for your intended outcome
and footprint is paramount to your success.
Your equipment is probably the first thing
you thought about when you started thinking
about what it would take to open a shop.
I'm sure you were surprised by how
hard certain items were to get and felt the
letdown of realizing a piece of equipment
wouldn't fit or wasn't what you thought it
would be. Making smart decisions early on
helps avoid the financial peril of choosing
the wrong tools for the job.
Pizza Oven
The most apparent and most considerable
item is your oven. You might have a perfect
oven in mind, but you need to consider some
things before purchasing. Most importantly,
will this oven crank out enough pizzas for
you to hit your numbers? Better question.
26 / P IZZATODAY.COM / MAY 2022
What's your ideal catering order? Can this
oven pull that off? I often see people who
want to buy a small oven because that's all
they can afford or because they want to
do a real niche style of pizza. The problem
occurs when this oven can only do 12 pizzas
an hour, and when the rush is over, you've
barely made enough money to pay utilities,
let alone rent.
Some ovens cannot sustain a full restaurant,
let alone a catering order. People in this
predicament would need to get multiple of
that pizza oven, but then their kitchen might
not have enough space. They haven't thought
out the repercussions of their choices. So
choose an oven that can pump out enough
product for you to pay your bills, or better
yet, thrive, or it won't matter how big your
walk-in is, how robust your beer list is, how
centrally located you are. You will fail. The
next thing to consider is the learning curve.
Is your oven super hard to use? Any oven
can be learned and used effectively, but if
you don't know how to use it, and you're
planning on hiring a bunch of high school
kids with little to no experience, then the
top-of-the-line Italian import might not be
the best idea.
It's possible to learn it, develop your skills,
become great and teach others. However,
if you're looking to buy an artisanal oven
and hand it off to someone to say, " Figure
it out, " that is a highly naive move. Along
with the oven, think maintenance. You have
to maintain it and take care of it. Different
ovens require different levels of maintenance.
Are you prepared to take that workload of
more complicated to-clean ovens? Some
ovens have windows that need to be cleaned
often. Some have tons of tiny little parts
where something goes wrong; everything
will fall apart.
I suggest you have a heart to heart with
yourself and answer: Do you want a Ferrari
or a tank? The next big decision is variability.
Are you looking to do one exact style of
pizza, or pan, Napoletana, classic American?
If you only have space for one oven, you
need to get an oven with variable ability.
Electrics are very good at this. Electrics have
bottom and top heat with decks that can
vary in style.
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