Pizza can taste good and be good for you, too. Just ask Brian Sullivan, senior vice president of culinary development at California Pizza Kitchen. In a recent interview with Glamour.com, Sullivan offered five ideas to "healthify" pizza, including:
Use a whole-wheat dough or mix whole grains and/or fresh herbs into your dough.
Use fresh and seasonable produce whenever possible. Think red heirloom spinach, baby fennel or squash.
Instead of calorie-heavy toppings or sauces, use savory spices, such as toasted cumin, ancho chili and dried Greek oregano, to create robust flavor.
Try alternative sauces, such as a fresh arugula pesto with grilled veggies or grilled chicken with a chimichurri rojo.
Add fresh torn basil, avocado slices or a drizzle of extra-virgin olive oil.
Caputo Flour and PMQ have teamed up to create a free webinar – "The New Naples: The Fast-Developing Neapolitan Pizza Industry in the USA" – for American pizzeria operators. The webinar, to be presented at 3 p.m. ET, Tuesday, Oct. 22, will highlight the moneymaking benefits of adding Neapolitan pizza to your menu. Featured guests will be Marco Dym, owner/operator of Marco's Coal-Fired Pizza in Denver, and Roberto Caporuscio, chef/owner of Don Antonio by Starita and Kesté Pizza & Vino in New York and the U.S. president of the Associazone Pizzaiouli Napoletani. This will be the first in a series of PMQ webinars aimed at helping pizzeria operators expand their businesses and increase their profits.
When you start feeling like there aren't enough hours in the day, it may be time to reassess your daily routine. Hundreds of articles have been written on the topic of being more productive with your time. Some of the top tips include
Waking up earlier
Assigning tasks such as accounting and cleaning to someone else
Setting time limits for meetings, emails and social media
Setting daily/weekly goals
Staying focused
Do you use any of these methods? Try some for a week and see how it affects productivity.
Don't miss our wrap-up of the 2014 International Baking Institute Expo (IBIE), including highlights of the American Pizza Championship culinary competition for Best Pizza and Best Gluten-Free Pizza.
Pizza Without Borders:
Boost Sales with Menu Engineering
When it comes to menu engineering, it's all in your customer's head, according to Spanish restaurant marketing guru Erika Sofia Aguilera. As the director of Marketing Gastronomico, she offers tips on menu engineering, with a special focus on taking advantage of the way the human brain works. Here are three of her top five recommendations:
Within a grouping of dishes, always list one with a considerably higher price so that the rest of the prices look lower by comparison. Your customers will accept higher prices if they feel you offer many good deals, too.
List your most profitable items in sections of the menu to which the gaze is naturally drawn. (Click the link below to see a visual illustration of this concept.)
Use descriptive adjectives that create a mouthwatering effect, such as "creamy," "crispy," "smoky," "fresh," "robust," etc.
A new pizzeria opening soon in Nashville has invited local artists and non-profit groups to participate in creating its menu. Musicians and representatives of charities will be invited to help design menu items for Music City Pizza and will receive part of the profits, according to a report by News Channel 5 in Nashville. The menu, which will feature pizzas, pastas and salads, will change every three months as new musicians join the project. "We want to support local musicians and businesses and charities like no other business has in the country," owner Keith Hayman told News Channel 5.
