freezing pizzas?

I think you should be able to get away with part cooking then freezing then a quick zap before serving. We make our pizzas and I often end up freezing the left overs and reheating and they taste fine and the base gets crispy again if I reheat on the pizza stone. Usually I do it in the microwave. If you can make your task easier for the exhibition, go for it - sounds like you'll have your hands full!

Good luck with the exhibition and the snacks! I love Blackheath - we're in Sydney.

On 2007-09-21, anthony wrote: [...]

Freezing is how I store leftover pizza. I usually just reheat a slice at a time in a countertop toaster oven, which is OK. It comes out a bit more dry than when it was fresh, and the flavors tend to be a bit muddled, but the crust is crisp. Microwaves do bad things to bread and crusts. I think reheating on a stone is a good idea, but only after it has mostly thawed, so you need to thaw some other way -- maybe on a pan on a rack above the stone?

Freezing it uncooked will likely affect the crust texture, as it tends to degrade the gluten bonds. I'm not sure if it would be better to thaw first or put the frozen raw pizza straight in the oven. I think, if you have time, that you might experiment a bit to see what works. Make two pizzas -- freeze one raw, bake one. Slice and freeze the baked one, and test different ways of reheating the next day, then test baking the frozen raw one. Make a couple of frozen raw ones and test different thaw/reheat methods on that, too, if you have the time and enough stomachs to dispose of the finished product.

Thanks Viviane -- that's all the reassurance I need. We love Blackheath too of course --arrived 4 years ago from Sydney (Paddington and Rushcutters Bay) and have never looked back .....

This isn't quite what you asked for, but, I do the following. After you make your dough and rise it and make your round, you bake it at the highest temp. your oven will go for 90 seconds. Take that out, punch the middle, not the edges, down, wrap it in foil, and stick that in the freezer. When you want a pizza, you thaw the round, apply your tomato, cheese, and the rest, and bake it as you would initially. All of this has to be done on a preheated pizza stone. I don't think you can really freeze or new composed pizza leftover pizza and make it work.

Kent

Thought I'd report on the result. I spent a couple of hours one Saturday night ahead of my wife's art exhibition making 12 pizzas (14 really, but two were for immediate consumption!) -- very simple, just a smear of tomato paste, mozzarella, some artichoke hearts and marinated sheep's fetta for the vegetarian pizzas and some tasty salami for the standard, and then sprinkled with parmesan and fresh herbs (oregano and basil). Cooked them in hot oven for six minutes -- everyting bound together nicely. Let cool right down before packing baking paper between each pizza and then wrapping in gladwrap. Then into the freezer. Came the night a week later -- we ate at the gallery after the show, which had a good big oven. I popped in my oven stones, and as soon as the oven reached heat, simply slid in each pizza, two at a time, for just five minutes. They came out crisp on the bottom, no sign of freezer-sogginess, and looked and tasted as if they'd been freshly cooked in one step. And they were being eaten faster than I could keep turning them out. With just a 5-minute cycle in between pizzas, I was finished cooking in just half an hour, and ready to get onto exploration of some good Australian shiraz! Cheers