You'd transfer it to a metal grate and then sauce, cheese, and top it. Operation was pretty quick, as long as the dough was in the right condition.
https://www.thrillist.com/eat/nation/how-costco-makes-its-pi...
I've wanted to make an automated pizza factory since leaving the business in 2015. Nobody seems to think it will work in my network, but I'm certain it can work.
A real automated pizza factory would take in raw ingredients, cut wash and serve them individually for each pizza. Self-clean everyone of it's own tools/arms and allow individually addressable toppings or as close as can be whilst having a speed capacity to match the highest order count. Shops near universities or financial districts can get insane orders.
If I were in the correct position I would go whole hog on the idea simply because I like it. I think with the range of robots out there, there is a large space for wozniak-level improvement on the factory/semi-automated model that most fast food stores currently use.
I wonder under the surface if there is some hidden principle I am missing politically or something. There must be a reason it hasn't happened yet already, it seems so doable.
The dough making & stretching is still done by humans.
It looks like this robot distributes sauce, cheese & toppings (it only shows one topping, though). Then cooks it.
Rise -> Proof -> rise again is the only way to evenly distribute the yeast. And you have to do it immediately before baking.
The dough could probably be mass-manufactured in a factory somewhere. But dough isn't very hard to make, and flour is WAAAAAAYYYY easier to store than live dough.
Would you rather be storing flour at your kitchens (which stores basically indefinitely at room temperature)... or would you rather be storing dough at your kitchens (which goes bad within 2 or 3 days and needs to be refrigerated). EDIT: It isn't so much that the dough "goes bad" as much as it "turns into sourdough" after a while.
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Hmm, a lot of commercial kitchens (ex: Auntie Annes, Costco) clearly use premade dough mass produced somewhere. Maybe they mix the dough upon receipt or something.
You can make a dough chewier or crispier by adding more (or less) water, yeast, salt, sugar, etc. etc. Ideally, you figure out the "ideal chewiness" and then make it consistently throughout the dough.
If I had infinite time to invent my ideal automatic pizza machine... I'd personally like to see the full high-quality bread cycle done on the dough. That is: ~1 hour for the bread to rise, punching down the dough, stretch the dough out onto its final form, ~1-hour for proofing the dough (maybe 20 minutes at 90F, since yeast reacts faster at that temperature), and THEN automatically spreading cheese on it.
Most of this time is just waiting by the way. But maybe some kind of "jukebox" design where a robot can work on a Pizza, automatically put it on a shelf somewhere (for the ~1 hour rise / proofing steps) and come back to it automatically would be great.
At least, when I manually make pizza, getting high-quality bread dough techniques on the pizza dough makes a difference in texture (chewiness and "evenness" of internal air bubbles).
A lot of Pizza shops don't care about the consistency of the dough however. They just pull the dough out of the frige and immediately make a pizza on it without the punchdown or proofing steps. And you can tell because of the "air bubbles" that often grow huge and break the consistency of the dough.
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EDIT: What is going on here, is that yeast is a living organism. Pull that dough out of storage, and the different yeast will reactivate at different times. The edges probably will have more active yeast, as it warms up faster).
When the dough enters the oven, it rises to ~110F or so first. The yeast highly accelerates and starts to produce carbon dioxide as it eats the sugars. But the "pockets" of highly-active yeast will make more CO2 than other areas of the dough.
Of course, the yeast dies by ~160F and the "puffiness" of the bread is then solidified by the heat of the oven.
That's why you punch down dough: so that all the (reactivated) yeast creates CO2 bubbles at an even rate across the dough.
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In practice, the Pizza is going to be limited by the speed + space of your Oven. I'm not sure if people need "faster" low quality pizzas, but improving the automation to create higher-quality pizzas should be the focus.