Cookaholics Bulletin Board

I have been trying to wrap my head around the math of feeding forty folks five pizzas for four days and can’t seem to make it work. Most of the pizza recipes I use are for twelve inch pizzas that will feed two us. Based on the ingredient list for my little pizzas, feeding forty might require 15-20 pounds of dough, 10 pounds of mozzarella and 10 cups of sauce.

Since I don’t have the experience or equipment to make 16” pizzeria pizzas, I have tried to imagine making twenty 12” pizzas whilst forty hungry geezers waited in the community room pounding the table and chanting “feed us, feed us” and decided that I would probably do delivery to back up my efforts in the kitchen.

For one thing, the geezers will probably eat less pizza. Other than that, it's a matter of production technique.
Make the dough, or buy it at the grocery.
Scale it into balls.
You can make the dough the day before, and scale it then too.
Roll the crusts out, laying them on sheet pans sprinkled with corn meal.
Make an assembly line- sauce (one ladle full, spread with back of ladle), cheese (generous covering), topping (moderate cover, especially if it's greasy), cheese (light sprinkle).
Stick in oven.
Once the dough is scaled the rest will take about an hour at your speed.

These people are in their 80's, 90's and 100's. Most of them eat very little. Some will only eat half a piece along with some of their Salad and a Dessert. They were ordering Jets for awhile and they would order 5 pizzas which weren't very large and they would have almost half of one leftover.

I hate to tell this but an older Italian woman I know made her pizzas from Pillsbury dinner roll mix She made them in sheet pans, one box of mix per pan. She did make her own sauce. The only topping was cheese. Everyone loved them and I have to admit I liked them, too.

fitzie

I just talked to the manager at the Assisted Living and I don't have to make Pizza Crusts, they are pre made. I'm not sure what they will be like so now I am worried about them becoming too hard when they bake. Any suggestions about Temps, baking time, a pan of hot water in the oven or anything else that might help?

I think if you bake them in cold pans and sauce them generously, you should get fairly soft pizzas. After all, that is the opposite of what you do when you want it very crisp. Besides, the sauce is the most flavorful part and folks who are losing taste buds will probably appreciate more of the tasty stuff.

Baking the pizzas in a cold pan sounds like a good idea. I'll give it a whirl. I found out last night that they had Banana Splits as a special activity this week, so those are off the menu. They really like Ice Cream, so of the 4 desserts that I will have to make, I want one of them to be ice cream based. I was thinking Deep Fried Ice Cream. I have never made it before and I was wondering if it would be too hard to make in volume since I have to make about 40 of them.

Sometimes people like the simplest things. How about a dish of vanilla ice cream with a choice of chocolate, strawberry, or caramel syrup? Fried ice cream sounds a little time consuming for 40 people. At least it does to me. Nice of you to take such pains for these folks.

fitzie

I will have about 4 hours between lunch and dinner and since the pizzas are going to be pretty easy to make, I will have plenty of time to make these and will probably look forward to having them to keep me busy. There is about 2 hours where I will be in the kitchen alone until the dishwasher comes in. so I won't have anybody in the way.

You coat a ball of ice cream with crushed cornflakes, freeze it for a while, then dip in beaten egg whites and coat with another layer of cornflakes and freeze again. Do you have a fryer to fry them in? Or several pots to heat oil in? They need at least an hour to freeze after the second coating. Getting them done won't take very long, but the chilling is essential.