Hi Pete,
Perhaps the recipes have changed since I worked there. When I worked there the company was owned by the original owner, Mike Valerio. I learned a lot about life in general working for that company, most importantly that following rules is key to success. Every item and every ingredient to every item on the menu had a printed recipe and procedure to follow. As far as the pizza measurements. We made dough 3 days prior to needing it to give it time in the fridge to and then room temperature to proof. The dough recipe had specific temperatures for the flour and water, a specific order to add the ingredients into the dough machine (some stores had commissary dough, some made their own depending on how far away from the commissary the store was. Commissary dough was never as good as store made dough!). Each doughball for a large pizza was supposed to weigh between 17 and 17 1/4 ounces. The dough was subject to weighing on any store visit by the Supervisor, Regional Manager, or Mike himself. I do not remember the size of a small pizza doughball although I think it was around 10ish or 14?? There was a prescribed number of doughballs to go into each dough box, the boxes were staggered in the walk-in for proper air circulation. Dates were placed on the boxes to make sure the dough was used on the proper day. We would make dough on Thursday for Saturday. If the temperature of the flour or water was off by even one degree, the dough wouldn't come out right. Many batches of yucky sticky dough when the water temperature was too high!
As far as making the pizzas, the dough was hand tossed using a mold to shape the dough first, we stretched the dough on the pizza bench covered in Wondra flour. No cornmeal when I was there or with the original owner. There were 2 ladels in the sauce pot. I will talk about the sauce later. One was a 6 oz ladle for small pizzas, one was an 8 oz ladle for large pizzas. I still have and use the 8 oz ladle from the store I first worked in when it closed. How you spread the sauce on the pizza was a written procedure, I still do it whenever I make pizza. There were also two cups in the in pizza cheese (I will talk about the cheese later too!). Each to measure the amount of cheese, a twelve ounce and not sure about the small, I had a cheese cup from my store too, but I got rid of it because I didn't use it at home. There are 36 pieces of pepperoni on a large pizza. Twelve down the center vertically, twelve across horizontally, and then each quarter filled in with 3, 2, 1 pieces. There was a scale that the pizza piel was put on and zeroed out so as to measure each topping exactly, even removing one mushroom if it made the weight too much! Talk about food cost control! I don't recall the oven temperature, but I believe it was around 525 ish...that might be high. The ovens were Hobarts with 5 rotating shelves. We used to have contests to see how many pizzas you could put in the oven before the first came out. Each pizza had a certain amount of time to be in the oven, but it was usually 6 times around. Oh and the pizzas went in the oven straight onto the shelf, no screens. The screens were used to heat individual slices of pizza.
The pizza sauce came as cans as sauce base, we added the spices which were oregano, pepper, garlic salt and maybe salt, but I don't remember if the salt was already in the tomato base or not...again each spice carefully measured! The cheese came in 5lb bags. The blend of cheeses in the bag, we just added the Romano and oregano to the cheese in cheese tubs.
I worked locally in stores and then worked as a training coordinator, traveling around opening stores, hiring and training the staff, then on to the next store. I also worked in the corporate headquarters in Dedham, all when it was family owned. I left the company just a year or so before it was bought by a corporation in California, I think. I am just going by my memory. I am sure a lot of the recipes and perhaps the quality control is gone now from when it was a tightly run ship by Mike Valerio. The lessons I learned from this company are lifelong! Working with the public, following strict procedures and having more fun than anyone should at a job is how I remember Papa Gino's! They say pizza sauce gets in your blood and you never loose it! I think that is true!
