All those variables that go into making a successful counter service booth for 15 million people might actually make the pizza quality worse than somewhere else where people have more time to get things right. Like, parbaking a pizza doesn’t improve it over just baking it fresh?
It sounds like they would, but techniques of scale (and, oddly enough, cooking things twice) are one of the reasons restaurant food always tastes different, and often better, though certainly often worse, than home cooked food. Parbaking or parboiling before finishing in an oven or pan is a really common way to be able to control texture and browning while also getting an even cook. Restaurants will do it with rolls, potatoes, steaks, large cuts of fish, and a lot of fibrous vegetables. With bread/crust, it changes how flexible and crispy it is, because water evaporates differently if it’s cooked twice for 5 minutes versus once for 10 minutes. With fries, it allows the inside to get soft rather than dry while the outside gets extra crispy. It offers lots of benefits, it just doesn’t make sense to do outside of a professional kitchen making dozens of servings at once.
Of course, plenty of restaurants go the opposite direction with how they take advantage of scale, and they make everything as cheap as possible and wind up as an Olive Garden knockoff, but good restaurants, fancy or not, make good food by using it to their advantage.
All those variables that go into making a successful counter service booth for 15 million people might actually make the pizza quality worse than somewhere else where people have more time to get things right. Like, parbaking a pizza doesn’t improve it over just baking it fresh?
It sounds like they would, but techniques of scale (and, oddly enough, cooking things twice) are one of the reasons restaurant food always tastes different, and often better, though certainly often worse, than home cooked food. Parbaking or parboiling before finishing in an oven or pan is a really common way to be able to control texture and browning while also getting an even cook. Restaurants will do it with rolls, potatoes, steaks, large cuts of fish, and a lot of fibrous vegetables. With bread/crust, it changes how flexible and crispy it is, because water evaporates differently if it’s cooked twice for 5 minutes versus once for 10 minutes. With fries, it allows the inside to get soft rather than dry while the outside gets extra crispy. It offers lots of benefits, it just doesn’t make sense to do outside of a professional kitchen making dozens of servings at once.
Of course, plenty of restaurants go the opposite direction with how they take advantage of scale, and they make everything as cheap as possible and wind up as an Olive Garden knockoff, but good restaurants, fancy or not, make good food by using it to their advantage.