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The traditional stuffed pizza is a favorite with many pizza lovers, but finding a pizzeria that offers it often requires going to Chicago. Because of the thickness, it can take 30 minutes or more to bake them, so many operators shy away from putting them on the menu. If you are one of those pizzeria owners, you may rethink stuffed pizza after this article. Abe Taha, owner of Chicago Style Pizzeria in Bloomington, Illinois, has found a way to cut cooking time of a two-inch thick stuffed pizza to about eight minutes. In addition, he may open your eyes to the benefits of cable TV advertising too.
“My wife and I are both ex-professors who went crazy and bought a restaurant,” Abe laughs. “But, this is the most enjoyable work we have done. We bought the restaurant in May of 1992 and moved the location in December of 1993. We try to be innovative and I have an Alfredo pizza that is our signature pizza that we introduced to the Bloomington area. We also have a Taco Pizza, Cilantro Chicken Pizza, Barbeque Chicken Pizza, Cajun Chicken Pizza and a Greek Spinach Pizza that is very popular.” The Stuffed Pizza The thing I was most interested in learning while talking to Abe was his idea for speeding up stuffed pizza cooking times. Abe’s stuffed pizza is different from any on the market. He starts with a two-inch deep pan and puts in a layer of dough, then a layer of cheese in the bottom, then the ingredients and then another layer of cheese. He seals it with a top layer of crust and runs it through the oven for about six minutes. After it goes through a six-minute cook cycle, he takes it out of pan and sprinkles cheese over the top and puts it back in for a short run to brown the crust. He serves it with a sauce on the side. 
“Most people like it with a traditional pizza sauce, but we have a sweet sauce which we offer too,” Abe says. “Some ask for Alfredo on the side, but I like to include the Alfredo inside the pizza unless someone doesn’t want it. The reason we went to the sauce on the side is because some customers ask for a lot of veggies. Vegetables have a lot of juice that is released and unless you dehydrate them, adding more sauce will make a mess of the pizza when it is cut. Some people don’t even want sauce. Another advantage of sauce on the side is that when you microwave or heat leftovers, the crust is great and there is no runny sauce to mess it up.” The Eight-Minute Innovation Abe has two innovations to the speed in which he can make a deep-dish pizza. The first is that ingredients are precooked. The second is the use of a baker’s inserts. “It is an insert/heat sink type thing that has prongs to transfer heat to the inside, which heats the middle of the pizza faster,” Abe says. “We precook meats because we don’t like to use raw meat, so we cook sausage earlier, chop it up and cool it so it is safe at all times. I can cook a stuffed pizza in about 15 minutes with assembly. “The newer baker’s inserts have Teflon, which is nicer than the old ones,” he adds. “Using baker’s inserts is similar to putting a nail inside a baked potato to heat up the inside faster. The baker’s inserts cost about $30 each and I found them in a catalog. I think the first people to use them may have been Pizza Hut, but they dropped the idea. I use a Middleby Marshal 570 oven and the overall cook time is just eight minutes.” Chicago Style Pizza Pizzeria offers three sizes of their stuffed pizza; the small is eight inches, medium is 10 inches and the large is 12 inches…and each is over two inches thick. The small weighs about three to three-and-a-half pounds, the medium is five to five-and-a-half pounds and large is about seven to seven-and-a-half pounds. That is a lot of food. Buffets Abe also offers a buffet every day. “I have 12 pizzas on the buffet at one time,” he says. “ We divide the buffet into meat and non-meat pizzas and have garlic bread and two pastas, one with creamy Alfredo sauce and one with a meat sauce. We put our gourmet pizzas on the buffet, but only in the evenings and not during the lunch buffet. We add soup during the cold months and of course, our salad bar is part of the buffet. The lunch buffet is $7.45 plus tax and the evening buffet is $9.45 plus tax. Kids three and under are free, aged four to 11 are $3.59 plus tax and seniors have a discount too. You can buy just the salad bar, but not just pizzas by themselves. 
“The lunch buffet is fast food for a lot of people,” Abe says. “ We have businesses with a lot of employees who come in, so it needs to be fast. When school is out, you get a lot of families. They pick what they want from pizzas and salads and we have never had a problem with it cannibalizing our other sales, but I will never do slices.” Sales and TV Advertising “We probably sell 1,000 pizzas a week,” Abe continues “Our weekly sales have been growing and last year we had 15 percent growth over the previous year. I attribute it to TV advertising. We aren’t on the main road, so TV advertising gets the word out. To my surprise, it is also a lot cheaper than other advertising we currently do and have done in the past. The cost to operators can vary from city to city. There are different tiers when it comes to buying the TV advertising, so packages differ. Packages involve a set number of ad airs for ‘X’ number of channels. They give you incentives for one-year contracts, such as extra ads if you go ahead and commit. We have done cable and local TV stations. “We have two packages, one with a local station and one with four stations on cable. The four-station package is only $500 a month. It gets 188 airs a month and we have 15-second and 30-second ads. The cost to produce the ads was only about $300. We use customers and kids in the ads. As far as us we are concerned, TV ads are the best thing we do and it builds on the extensive radio and newspaper ads that we have done. 
“Customers were familiar with our name, so our ad content shows them what we have to offer. We showcased the stuffed crust and how it was made in one set of ads and another ad has kids asking about what pizza to order for dinner and not being able to agree on a pizza, so we showed the buffet at the end of that ad. You have to determine what message you want and incorporate that into the marketing.” Conclusion If 30-minute baking times have caused you to dismiss offering stuffed pizza, you may want to rethink the idea. Do some searching and locate a supplier for baker’s inserts. Experiment with them and if you can work out a stuffed pizza that can be cooked in eight minutes, test it out on your customers. If it works, try calling up your local cable company and investigating TV advertising. The advertising may be cheaper than what you think and the profits could be surprisingly good. – PMQ – |