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Pizza

Dough is time, and time is the one ingredient nobody can shorten

Everything else on a pizza line can be made faster. Proving cannot, and designing around that is most of the work.

Why pizza is the easy one and the hard one

Pizza is the dish machines were tried on first, because the shape is round, the process is short and the oven is the only real variable. Most of it has been solved somewhere and much of what was patented has expired.

The hard part is that a pizza is judged on things a machine cannot measure. Crust structure comes from fermentation, and fermentation is hours of doing nothing in a warm room. A line that tries to compress that ends up making flatbread with toppings on it.

So the machine is built around the wait rather than against it. Dough is made in batches ahead, held at temperature, and drawn from when the orders arrive. What gets automated is everything that happens after the dough is already right.

A dough line drawn as divider, proofer and sheeter with the times marked On the left a hopper drops portions of dough marked two hundred and sixty grams. In the middle a proofing cabinet holds twelve dough balls in three rows, each row larger than the one above, marked proof twenty four hours. On the right two rollers flatten the dough into a sheet marked four millimetres. Along the bottom a blue curve rises and falls under the words time is the ingredient nobody can shorten. 260 g PROOF . 24 h 4 mm TIME IS THE INGREDIENT NOBODY CAN SHORTEN DIVIDER . PROOFER . SHEETER
Bagaren vid ugnen
A ball of dough resting. Nothing visible is happening, and that is the part of the process a machine cannot speed up.

Dough

The divider is cheap, the proofer is the investment

A divider cuts a hundred and sixty portions an hour to within a few grams and costs about what one month of the hand doing it costs. That machine pays for itself and nobody argues about it.

The proofer is where the money and the floor space go. It has to hold a lot of dough at a steady temperature and humidity for a long time, which means it is large, it runs constantly, and it cannot be switched off to save power on a quiet Tuesday without wrecking Wednesday.

A conveyor oven in section with the temperature curve under it An oven chamber is drawn in section with a conveyor running through it. Six glowing arrows point down from the roof and six point up from the floor. Three pizzas lie on the belt, the last one drawn heavier than the first two, under an arrow marked eighty eight seconds, crown to crust. Below, a blue curve rises to a blinking point marked three hundred and twenty degrees at the stone. 88 s . CROWN TO CRUST 320 C AT THE STONE HEAT IN . HEAT OUT . NOTHING ELSE
En linje som gör pizza
The last cut before it goes out. This is the step people picture being automated, and it is the cheapest one to leave to a person.

Oven

The oven sets the pace for everything upstream

A conveyor oven runs at one temperature and one belt speed, and those two numbers decide the whole line. Once the oven is chosen, how fast the dough station has to work and how many people the counter needs are both already settled.

Which is why the oven is picked first and the rest is designed backwards from it. Doing it the other way round is the most common expensive mistake in a kitchen build, and it is not recoverable without buying a second oven.

The temperature itself is not a secret. A stone deck for a Neapolitan style base runs far hotter and far shorter than a conveyor for a pan pizza, and the two lines that result do not look alike at any point.

The choices

Four decisions that set the rest of the build

None of these is about robots. All four are about heat, time and what the dough is allowed to do.

DecisionWhat it settlesWhat it costs to change later
Oven typeBelt speed, temperature, and therefore the pace of the lineA second oven, and the floor to stand it on
Proving timeHow much dough has to be in the building at onceFloor space, which is usually the thing there is none of
Base thicknessBake time, and whether a sheeter or a press is rightOne machine, and it is the cheap one
Topping methodWhether a doser is enough or an arm is neededThe difference between a cheap station and the most expensive one

The order matters more than any single choice. Oven, then dough, then toppings, then packing. Every build that went the other way round paid for it.

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A conveyor oven in section with the temperature curve under it An oven chamber is drawn in section with a conveyor running through it. Six glowing arrows point down from the roof and six point up from the floor. Three pizzas lie on the belt, the last one drawn heavier than the first two, under an arrow marked eighty eight seconds, crown to crust. Below, a blue curve rises to a blinking point marked three hundred and twenty degrees at the stone. 88 s . CROWN TO CRUST 320 C AT THE STONE HEAT IN . HEAT OUT . NOTHING ELSE

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Tell us the style and the covers per evening. We will read what has been tried before either of us draws anything.

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