3 ms·
The pizza ovens at this scale are massive industrial conveyer belts: the bake time is the time it takes the conveyer to move from the start of the oven to the e
by WorldMaker 4y ago
The pizza ovens at this scale are massive industrial conveyer belts: the bake time is the time it takes the conveyer to move from the start of the oven to the end of the oven. The length of the conveyer belt is influenced by the number of pizzas (and other baked goods such as pastas, wings, and baked desserts) they want to be able to bake in somewhat parallel (obviously it is something more like a queue, but there's a major overlap in baking times of consequent items). The speed of the conveyer belt is influenced by operator safety concerns and also avoiding the "Lucy and Ethel backup problem" (from the famous episode of I Love Lucy about the conveyer belt at the chocolate factory).
In many ways, at this industrial scale of oven the pizza recipes (and pasta recipes and wing types and baked desserts and everything else sent through the oven) are calibrated specifically to the bake times of the chosen oven conveyer belt length and speed rather than the other way around.
(Which isn't to suggest that such ovens don't get redesigned from time to time, but that's likely a large enough project that Tracker programmer has plenty of lead time.)
- boomboomsubban 4y agoThe conveyer pizza ovens I've seen had configurable speeds and temps on them, though nobody ever touched them. I always assumed it was for different altitudes. So the tracker program likely already expects configurable times.
- toast0 4y agoI've seen similar controls on conveyor toasters, and seen conveyor pizza ovens in operation. If you really wanted to adjust the temperature/speed for a particular item, you'd need to leave a gap before and after that item (or group of that items, I guess), and that would ruin your throughput. You really want everything to cook at the same temperature and the same speed. Or you need multiple pipelines, one for each temperature and speed.
- boomboomsubban 4y agoAdjusting for a particular item is nearly impossible, but an oven somewhere like Denver might have a different configured speed and temperature than an oven in Texas.
- bombcar 4y agoI've seen a pizza place where they had two different speed ovens, one was for the simple pizzas and the other was for more complicated/thicker ones.
- function_seven 4y agoBack when I worked in a pizza place, we solved this same issue by just pushing the pie in further (for thin), or by yanking one back to the start after a couple minutes (for well-done requests). In the second scenario, prep guy would put an empty screen behind the pizza to reserve the space.
- mytailorisrich 4y agoThose pizzas ovens are designed for efficiency, consistency, and not to require skilled workers: you pop the pizza in and it will come out exactly the same every time. Handling a traditional pizza oven is tricky and requires skills.