Everyone loves pizza. At least that’s what commercial baking trends have shown in 2016 as pizza sales reached the highest peak in the last four years. In fact, the average American eats an average of 23 pounds a year! Pizza dough suppliers are building bigger lines, with ability for more variety, according to reports. More artisan-type crusts are also seeing a jump in popularity.
Producing quality pizza dough depends on quick, efficient lines that can handle large quantities of dough. However, this is true for any product line. The equipment and process you use really does make a difference in the final product.
Equipment’s Role in Perfection
Sure, quality ingredients and recipes go a long way for dough and ultimately the final product that consumers will be happy with. However, you are really selling yourself short if you don’t prepare it in the right way. As was discussed last month, the way water interacts with dry ingredients impacts factors such as product hydration, dough extensibility and shelf life. Dough mixed with Rapidojet technology sees an increase in water absorption levels from 57% to 62%, while mixing time is cut in half!
After the dough is mixed, it’s still important to keep it moving effectively through your production line, without damaging it. One of our goals with Rapidojet technology is to empower food producers to better provide the quality products their customers want. That’s why we’ve been developing our “Dough Sheet Former.” A transfer pump (either supplied from a plant or one from Rapidojet) feeds dough to the sheet former, which delivers a continuous dough sheet to your make-up line—whether that’s pizza dough, flat bread, pita or corn chips. In most lines, dough comes out of a pressurized mechanism, which causes the dough to “snap back” or shrink under the stress. With Rapidojet technology, this “snap back” is reduced because gluten is fully hydrated, develops faster, becomes more extensible at a lower temperature.
The patented Rapidojet dough sheet former.
But we don’t want to stop there. Processes can always be improved and innovation never stops. Dough hydrated and mixed with the help of Rapidojet is delivered through our sanitary and CIP-able transfer pump to the patented Rapidojet “Dough Sheet Former”. This continuous dough sheet with variable thickness is delivered directly onto the existing make-up line for processing.
Pizza and Beyond
The idea is to take full advantage of the benefits and simplicity of Rapidojet technology, giving you as much production space as possible. And with our tried and tested systems, that’s saying a lot. It would cut back the energy and labor used, while improving product consistency, shelf life and initial investment. Meanwhile, total yields would increase by around 5%. That’s a lot of pizza you could be selling to a hungry public!
Send an email to me at ken@bakeryconcepts.net and ask how Rapidojet can help improve your production process or read more about our improvement to dough.
