A Hungarian business has said it can help foodservice operators cut the time and labour required to serve sourdough pizza.
DoughLAB produces a pizza range that is designed to enable businesses to serve Neapolitan-style pizza without needing a specialist chef on each shift. The pizzas are also sold under the Madre brand at retail.
The pizzas DoughLAB supplies are par-baked and frozen, which removes dough preparation and the first bake from the kitchen, with final cooking taking around two minutes after thawing.
“We wanted to take the most difficult and unpredictable part of the process out of the restaurant and move it into a controlled environment,” said DoughLAB co-founder and chief executive Josep Zara.
“If the fermentation, stretching, ingredients and first bake can be controlled centrally, the restaurant team can concentrate on service instead of reproducing an entire specialist production process during every shift.”
Madre is already available in Hungary, and DoughLAB is hoping to supply its pizzas to UK hospitality businesses through distributors and foodservice wholesalers, alongside direct supply agreements with retail chains.
The pizzas are produced using an active liquid sourdough from Altamura in southern Italy, and the dough is fermented for 48 hours. Each pizza is then stretched and topped by hand using ingredients including DOP San Marzano tomatoes, before being par-baked on volcanic stone at around 450°C.
“The easiest way to increase output would be to automate everything. But if you press this type of dough mechanically, you can destroy the structure that gives a Neapolitan pizza its characteristic rim,” said Zara. “Working with living dough at this scale is difficult, but that is exactly why we decided to keep hand-stretching as part of the process.”
The pizzas then pass through a liquid-nitrogen freezing tunnel at DoughLAB’s 2,000 sq m factory in Szigetszentmiklós, near Budapest. The supplier said the cryogenic process freezes them rapidly, producing smaller ice crystals than slower freezing methods to help preserve the dough’s open structure and the texture of the toppings.
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