Utilizing frozen dough balls made by trusted commercial bakeries for your food business can mean less labor, less money spent, and more consistent quality in your pizza products. Don’t believe it? Here are some of the top myths you may have heard about using frozen dough, laid out and debunked!
Myth 1: Frozen Pizza Dough Won’t Match the Quality of Dough Made from Scratch.
When you freeze pizza dough, the activity of the yeast slows down to near inactive. The yeast is still there, however, alive and waiting. As soon as the dough balls are taken out of the freezer and begin to defrost, the yeast reactivates and releases a gas causing the dough to rise. When you freeze dough balls, all you’re doing is pausing this activity and extending the lifespan of your dough. The taste of your pizza dough will remain unchanged.
If pizza dough is made from scratch using premium ingredients and then frozen immediately, it can maintain its freshness for up to 180 days. Choosing a trusted frozen dough supplier will ensure that your pizza products made from frozen pizza dough balls will meet or even exceed the quality, and most certainly the consistency of scratch-made dough.
Offering inconsistent food products can be damaging to the reputation of your business. If your customers do not taste the same quality every time, they will have no reason to come back. Limiting room for error with reliable, high-quality frozen doughs will result in higher customer satisfaction and retention.
Myth 2: Working with Frozen Dough Balls Takes Too Much Training and Time to Proof.
You may think that the time you save by using frozen dough will just be lost in training your staff to work with them, as well as in the actual time frozen dough balls take to proof. Turns out this is not the case.
Training your team to recognize the signs of proper proofing, such as watching for the volume of the dough to double, looking for the appearance of a slightly yellow color, testing for finger indentations that remain on the surface, and watching for a golden brown color with small to medium blisters in the final baked product will be easier than you think. Once they have these tips down, the rest is in the proofing.
Frozen dough balls will need a 48 to 72-hour proofing cycle, but once you have a system in place, this can be easily managed as part of your kitchen’s food prep routine. This should not be a disruption to food service, as the freezer-proof-prep-serve rotation will allow you to have fresh dough always on hand.
Myth 3: Frozen Dough Balls will Cost More than Dough Made from Scratch.
If your in-house team is already making pizza dough from scratch, frozen dough balls may seem like an unnecessary and costly luxury. The expenses of making dough, however, do not stop at the labor costs.
Making pizza dough on a commercial scale requires the acquisition and maintenance of oversized and expensive equipment, large orders of bulk ingredients that produce more food waste and wasted investments, and extra floor space to store everything. Buying frozen dough balls from a quality, trusted pizza dough manufacturer allows you to cut down on all of these extra costs.
Myth 4: Using Par-baked Crusts is Easier than Frozen Dough
Once a frozen dough ball is out of the freezer and properly proofed for 48 hours, it will be ready to roll. This, however, may seem like more hassle than the ultimate convenience of using par-baked pizza crusts.
In actuality, both par-baked crusts and frozen dough allow food businesses to create consistent pizza products for their customers. When making thin-crust or take and bake pizzas, par-baked crusts would be a great option. However, if you want to offer a chewy, thicker crust, Neapolitan style, or hand-tossed pizzas, frozen dough is the way to go.
The other great advantage to using frozen pizza dough over par-baked is its versatility. Par-baked crusts will make pizzas, yes. But, frozen dough can be used to make many other signature items to help set your menu apart, including calzones, stromboli, bread sticks, flatbreads, garlic knots, sweet cinnamon rolls, and much more.
Quality, Savings, and Consistency with Frozen Dough Balls
Providing your customers with high-quality and consistent menu items is important to the financial model of any food business. Because of this, you may think that offering only scratch-made food is the way to go. In reality, utilizing the help of trusted commercial bakeries and suppliers for products such as frozen dough balls or similar will add elements of consistency and convenience, ensuring even better customer satisfaction. All of these benefits should help debunk the myths about frozen dough you have been led to believe.
