Part cooking pizza for party

[madiran]

Does anybody have any experience of part cooking pizza for a large party?
Flash cook a bare base until it won't stick or part cook with sauce and/or toppings? any help would be gratefully received.

My pizza base making skills are not sufficiently well developed for rapid pizza making and I rather unwisely offered to run a Soiree Pizza for a charity fund raising, next week...I don't seem to be able to locate Caputo flour here (France) and 00 pizza flour is unobtainable locally-I use Molino Spadoni 00 bought online, instant yeast here is horrible so I get baker's yeast from the boulangerie when I need it. Starting from scratch I used the FB dough recipe but it is either slack and sticky or tough and springy-though I did manage to get it about right a few days ago but have not been able to repeat it in spite of abiding to strict time/temperature/weight/mixing-if it were consistently bad or good I could fix it, or not as the case may be, but I seem to get inconsistent results from a consistent system(except for the FB Pompei oven which works perfectly, pictures to follow)

Cheers

[scottz]

Re: Part cooking pizza for party

Hi Madiran,
In regards to your FB dough recipe....I find that it takes awhile to get the dough to be what you want it to be. Took me roughly 10 months on and off of dough making to get it right. You add your own twists to the recipie, take some things out, add some things in and you sort it out in the end. In regards to pre-made bases, they wont have the same qualitly of hand made dough, but you can either buy pre-made bases from the supermarket (and just be careful how you cook it) or buy pre-made dough from a baker. I have mates of here who buy pre-made dough all the time. At the end of the day, I dont think people will be complaining about your pizzas too much, you are doing something for charity and the fact that your taking your time to help other people is what people will enjoy the most.

Good luck, you will do fine.
Scott

[madiran]

Re: Part cooking pizza for party

Hi scottz,

I was thinking more in terms of making my own pizza bases, part cooking 15/20 of them so a colleague and I can assemble and cook the things as quickly as possible. I have just found that taking the dough ball out of the fridge about 30 mins prior to use, dumping it in a round tray of flour and forming the base works very well indeed, more or less solving a whole bunch of issues. You are right though, time and practise is what is really required, but Sunday afternoon will be here sooner....!

? bient?t, as they say here.
Madiran

[madiran]

Re: Part cooking pizza for party

The answer is don't bother pre cooking, I did a few as a reserve 'buffer', and didn't use them-cooked 40 pizzas for the 39 guests in about an hour 15mins with no complaints and no waiting. I radically improved my technique as a result and the final 10 or so were almost perfectly consistent! Pizzas were raved about by everybody there French, English and Italian and especially by the teenagers who are notoriously hard to please. All in all it was extremely successful and we raised a lot af money for charity. Thanks to James and the FB team for the oven plans and thanks to the forum users for providing lots of useful information.