I Think this is from guy that do the dough prep..
Making Pizza, Sbarro-Style
At Sbarro, the one in Annapolis Mall, I was a prep cook for years, the only one dedicated to the task (if I wasn't there, one of the managers had to fill in). I used to work 60-hour weeks in the summer, 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM, Monday through Saturday. I prepared all the dough, made all the sauce, grated all the cheese, chopped all the vegetables, and prepared other things like lasagnas.
The dough was the central and largest task. It consisted of 75 lb. batches of dough, up to six batches a day. That comes out to aroud 300 large dough balls per day.
This was the recipe and general procedure for one batch:
1 50-lb sack of Lisante Pizza flour
1 1/2 oz dry active yeast
1 lb Lard
salt, little bit of sugar
24 lbs ice water.
I don't remember the timing exactly, but the water and yeast, salt ans sugar was mixed for a little while on the floor-model, 5-foot-high hobard mixer. Then the flour and lard added, and the whole thing would mix, with a two-foot dough hook attatchment on the Hobart, for something like 20 minutes.
When the dough was ready, I picked up the 90lb bowl off the mixer and emptied it onto the table. This was an awesome long table, top made entirely out of butcher block.
After that I cut and rolled the entire batch into 24 oz balls. "Rolling" means stretching the ball around on itself, producing a nice, round, smooth ball. I got so I could do two at once, working them one-handed against the table. The balls went into dough trays for storage and proofing rising), six balls per tray.
I'd go through this proceess up to six times per shift, not counting all the other prep work.
Also, we used the same dough for calzones, and the process was the same except the dough balls were only six ounces. I hated that because it;s not all that much less effort to roll a 6-oz ball than a full size one, and being smaller, there's so much many more to do per batch.
Actually, I usually only had to roll a couple of trays of calzone douogh balls, or about 48, for the next day, and the rest of the batch wou;d be regular 24 oz pizza balls.
But sometimes, during the holiday season, I'd have to do a whole batch of calzone balls. That was rough, wich a whole bacth making for some 200 calzone balls. The huge pile of dough never seemed to dimish when rolling for calzone.
A word about the ice water: If you ever made dough or bread at home, you might wonder about this, since most of the time bread dough needs to be warm to rise.
Well, the thing is, it's actually that dough needs to be warm to rise fast, as in, ready to bake sometime in the next couple of hours.
The truth is, once the yeast is activated (mixed with water), it's going to rise no matter what happens. when it's cold, it just rises more slowly.
Since I was preparing dough for use the next day, I actually needed to keep the brakes on the yeast as much as possible, or else it would rise too much, too fast, and become an unuable mess by the next day.
The ice water kept the dough cold during the cutting and rolling process. Then, into the walk-in refrigerator it went as soon as rolling was done, hopefully still cold.
There were times (rare, thankfully), perhaps in the summer if the Mall's AC was on the fritz, when the dough got too warm The dough balls would rise too much overnight, merging into one solid pan of dough. Usually this dough would have to be tossed, but there were a few occasions of extreme business when we didn't have enough to spare, and couldn't afford to dump the badly risen dough. Then it tested theh pizza-makers's skill, to cut out usable sections from the pan and form it best he/she could into a decently shaped pizza. Fortunately, we had good makers.Next: Lemme tell you about how they (I) USED to make sauce at Sbarro.
