Pies of Piety

My church’s first made-from-scratch pizza day went very well. I cranked out 8 Sicilians. The last two sold before I baked them. The pastor made me send two slices backstage after the first service, at ten a.m.! And one of his daughters in law, who bought part of the last two pies, described the pizza as “life-changing.” One of my armorbearer buddies tried it and confirmed what I already knew: “better than Steve’s.”

Steve’s is the place two blocks from the joint I’m tempted to buy. Steve’s is very popular, and there’s nothing wrong with the pizza. But it isn’t life-changing.

I can’t shake the belief that God handed me this recipe. I’ve been making very good thin pizza for a long time, but Sicilian has been a puzzle. I started working on it recently, and it progressed by giant leaps until it was so good, it was better than I had realized pizza could be. The first time I tried to make it was on January 18, and even that first pie was the best Sicilian I had ever had.

We need to make changes at the cafe. We need to time the pizzas to match the ends of the services. We had some people receiving cold slices today. We need to buy some boxes. I sent a friend’s wife home with a pizza in an aluminum pan. We need a second cash register. And we need to be ambitious. I can make 20 pizzas on a Sunday, no problem. We can sell that many, once word gets out. We should be able to unload another 20 on the weekday of their choice.

We also need better communication. Somebody threw out around seven pounds of flour, probably thinking it was a bag of trash.

I think they were worried about working me too hard, but my concern is that they won’t make enough pizza. As long as I’m standing there, they need to make use of me. They don’t pay for labor, so every pie is mostly profit. The more they sell, the more the church makes.

If we could start attracting attention, it would not be hard to sell a couple hundred pizzas a week. That would net the church a hundred grand a year, more or less.

I need to streamline production. I need to start rolling the dough into rectangles and letting it rise in the pans instead of in containers. Doubling the size of the pizzas would help, although not a great deal. One problem with doubling the size is you lose a lot of crust, and the crust is a big feature of Sicilian pizza.

The pans I seasoned worked great. Two of them had a couple of sticky places, but that won’t happen again, now that they’ve been used. I wiped them down and hid them in my prep table. Those things are absolutely vital. I don’t want somebody making scrambled eggs in them.

It’s shocking how fast you can make pizza in one little convection oven. I baked two pies at a time, but I could do six, with practice. Each pie takes around eight minutes to bake, including toasting the bottom. I figure I could do approximately 25 an hour, if I didn’t have to do anything else.

It doesn’t take much room, either. The two little tables they gave me are all I need for preparation. Cleanup wasn’t bad at all. Twenty minutes, if people would get out of my way.

I used the food processor today, but I’m thinking next time I’ll just take a big bowl and make five pounds of no-knead flour at a pop. The food processor is faster and easier for small batches, but I can only do two pounds at a time.

This is a breeze. I can’t believe everybody’s not doing it. Well, yes I can. They can’t. Just like they can’t kill a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of an ass. You need to be hooked up.

To run a small pizza place, you need one person during really slow times and two to three when it picks up. This is doable.

I enjoyed the notoriety today. I got a cheer before I left. And now people will be nice to me. In case they need me.

They were already nice, though.

I ate one slice, and I paid for it. I don’t want to set a bad example by cheating. I wasn’t going to eat pizza today, but I skipped breakfast, and I was in a hurry.

Man, I’m looking at what I wrote, above. Two hundred pizzas a week equals a hundred grand for the church. In a store, it would be less, because I’d pay rent and utilities and so on. On the other hand, I’d sell a lot more than two hundred pizzas a week. Today people were happy to pay $2.50 for a four-by-four-and-a-half-inch slice. I wonder what the street price is. The food cost is about $4.00 for six slices, so we netted eleven bucks a pie, or at least we will when people stop throwing flour out.

Let’s see. Flour cost: eleven cents. Sauce: twenty cents. Cheese: $1.65-$2.10, depending on what I use. So the pies cost $1.91-$2.41, plus a piddling amount for the tiny quantities of oil and seasonings. Figure on using Grande cheese in the future, and it’s on the expensive side, so about $2.40 per pie. Sell the pie for $15.00 as slices or $12.00 as a pie. The net on a pie is at least $9.60 before paying rent, employees, utilities, and so on. Add toppings, and you have what amounts to a license to steal. A dollar-fifty (Papa John’s price) for ten cents’ worth of onions or four ounces of cheap meat. The meat may not make you much money, but the vegetables sure will. And then there are rolls and soda. I don’t think cheesecake would be a big profit generator, because it’s expensive to make, but it would get people into the store, for sure.

As for toppings, let’s say mushrooms, onions, green peppers, and ham. Figure a dollar of profit on the ham and roughly $3.50 on the other junk, so maybe $4.50. Now you’re netting around fourteen bucks on the pie. Does that look right? I have never paid the bills at a pizzeria. Surely if you sell fifty or a hundred pies a day, you can find enough gross profit to survive.

The pizzeria I’m looking at now can cook twelve pies at once, and a thin pie takes seven minutes. Call it ten minutes for a thin or thick pie. Seventy-two pies an hour. Something like that. That’s 14″ pies, and my Sicilians are only 9″ by 12″.

I felt good about the convection oven until I wrote that. Three times the pizza, in the same time, with about the same energy cost. Probably.

I think the key is not to compete with the bottom-feeders. Then you end up looking for cheese made from soybeans and guar gum, and your pizza is bad, and the chain next door can sell equally bad pizza for less. If selling bad pizza were a good idea, Papa John’s wouldn’t be struggling right now, and they are. Besides, who wants to be known for doing something really badly? John Schnatter isn’t a chef. He’s a bean-counter. There is value in that–he’s rich–but there isn’t much satisfaction. Not for me, anyway.

People say the pizza market is bad, but at the good places, customers form lines around the block. That will always be true, unless we have a full-blown depression.

Fun to think about.

I better go shower the deep-fryer smell off myself. Although I will miss it.

While I’m gone, check THIS out. Like you haven’t already. Chris gets better every week.