Baking & Snack - July 2004 - 113

PROCESSING TECHNOLOGY

Building a
From sheeting and cutting to slicing, manufacturers have designed
a variety of equipment for the ever-increasing selection of frozen pizzas.
BY K.J. BURRINGTON
ast growth in the frozen pizza
market fueled the development
of pizza processing technology
during the past 20 years. Not
only has the number of pizzas in
grocery store freezer cases increased
but so has the variety. Equipment
suppliers have designed machinery,
including customized pizza lines, to
make the desired finished product,
whether customer orders call for
family size or single serve, thin or
pan-style crust, topped with meat or
vegetables or multiple cheeses.

CREATING CRUST. Pizza lines generally begin with mixed dough that is
fed into a hopper and then formed
into a continuous sheet. Roller dies
cut the sheeted dough into circular
disks, or a guillotine knife portions
rectangles. This line is known as a
base line. An Ohio-based supplier
offers stress-free feeding and standard
3-roll extruder sheeting systems. Both
methods have advantages and
disadvantages. "The 3-roll
extruder works the dough
more, but you can sheet to
a thinner dough," noted
the supplier.
This method degasses the dough so weights
are more consistent. Scrap
dough can be added back
to the hopper, and the
scrap and virgin dough are
mixed together. The stress-free
system does not work the dough or
degas it. The dough is rolled about

2.5 in. thick. "Sometimes the weights
are not as consistent because you
aren't degassing," added the equipment manufacturer. "You also can't
add scrap because there is no mixing action, so you might see the old
dough in the new dough."
To reduce the dough from 2.5 in.
(63.5 mm) to 3 mm, more gauging
will be needed compared with the
3-roll extruder line. If the pizza manufacturer is not happy with its crust
quality, then it might want to go with
a stress-free feeding system. Both
systems use similar dough reduction
rolls after the feeding system.
A quick reducer, or satellite head,
consists of nine orbiting rollers on
the top and a base roller on the
bottom. As its name suggests, this
system sheets dough fast and offers a
4:1 reduction in dough thickness. A
2-roll gauging station with top and

bottom rollers yields a 2:1 dough reduction. "The choice of gauging stations begins by looking at the final
thickness you are targeting for the
dough," said the equipment supplier.
Cross rollers can be added to work
the dough in the opposite direction
to achieve the final width of the
dough. All of these systems work together to form a continuous dough
sheet with the desired thickness.
After sheeted to the target thickness, the dough is cut into the necessary shape. The supplier offers stamp
and rotary cutters. A rotary cutter
runs at a different speed than the
belt to allow for shrinkage. Before the
equipment manufacturer designs a
cutter, it will do shrinkage tests on a
customer's dough. "Changeovers are
easy because we can put a carousel on
the line with

July 2004 / BAKING & SNACK / 113

Baking & Snack - July 2004

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