November,
For quite some time, in my reading at the PMQ Think Tank and Pizza Today Bulletin Board, I would find both terms used. The terms were pretty much used interchangeably but the term "par-bake" was by far the more common usage. To be honest, I found the use of the two terms to be somewhat irritating because it meant that I would have to use both terms (sometimes with and without hyphens) whenever I wanted to do a search on the subject at the abovementioned forums. To this day, I find it irritating.
From my reading, the most common context in which the term "par-bake" was used was in relation to crusts that were prepared commercially by companies for use by pizza operators. Some pizza operators make their own rather than buying them, with a common example being deep-dish crusts. I think in that case making prepared crusts in advance makes sense because deep-dish pizzas usually take a lot longer to bake than regular pizzas. It is also easy to do. Interestingly, Wikipedia even goes so far as to make parbaking a deep-dish pizza crust a component of that style (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago-style_pizza). It's possible that some pizza operators specializing in cracker-style pizzas will make their own parbaked crusts but I do not sense from my reading that that is a common practice. I know also that there are some pizza operators who will prepare par-baked crusts in advance when they have to make pizzas--especially in volume--at an offsite location, such as at a fair, or where there are limited facilities to prepare pizzas from scratch.
In my own case, after considering all of the possibilities as noted above, I simply decided to create my own naming convention, and to refer to crusts that are to be partially baked and then promptly finished as "pre-baked" and to use the term "par-baked" for everything else. Since I don't "pre-bake" deep-dish crusts or regular crusts, my most common usage of the term "pre-bake" is for cracker-type crusts--in those instances in which I do partially bake them. I will also use the term in respect of pizzas made by others where a pizza crust is partially baked and then promptly finished.
I might add that I have also found the semantic difference to come in handy when revisiting my own posts. As soon as I see the terms, I know what I did. The distinction also comes in handy when searching my own posts. Boboli gets around the naming problem by simply referring to their product as "pizza crusts". That is perhaps a better marketing approach than referring to their crusts as par-baked or pre-baked.
Peter
