If you plan to get serious about your fantastic pizza recipe and want to safely store and distribute frozen pies as gifts or for sale, blast freezing offers the recommended approach to safe food storage. Cooked foods destined for freezing must pass as quickly as possible through the "danger zone" where bacteria grow, which lies between 40 and 140 degrees Fahrenheit. A blast freezer fulfills this goal. It features a cabinet with cold air moving at high velocity laterally over the pizza to cool and ultimately freeze the pie and to keep the food looking good, as the wind keeps large ice crystals from forming.
Step 1
Cook or assemble your pizza to fit the size of the sheet pan inside the blast freezer, typically 18 inches in diameter at most.
Step 2
Shrink-wrap your pizza, whether cooked or just assembled, before placing it in the blast chiller to avoid drying, especially of the crust, advises James Piliero, sales development manager for Traulsen, a blast-freezer maker in Fort Worth, Texas. "This step is particularly important in the case of uncooked pizzas, as the dough dries quickly in the blast chiller's rapid air stream, which can impact the quality of the finished product," he said in an online interview.
Step 3
Load the shrink-wrapped pizzas on the sheet pans without stacking them on top of each other, since this can adversely affect freeze times and result in product inconsistency, Piliero recommends. You can load cooked pizzas directly from the oven to the blast freezer.
Step 4
Leave the pizza in the blast freezer until it reaches 37 degrees, if you plan to reheat it and serve after a few days.
Step 5
Let the pizza rest until it reaches 20 degrees if you plan to store it frozen for a longer time. After it reaches 20 degrees, remove the pizza from the blast freezer and place it inside a standard walk-in or reach-in freezer, so that it reaches 0 degrees.
Step 6
Record the time it takes your pizza, whether cooked or uncooked, to become chilled at 37 degrees or frozen at 20 degrees, as measured by an approved food thermometer or the internal chiller gauge, and stick to this for future batches. Anticipate that a New York-style pizza will take less time than a Chicago deep-dish one. In addition to pizza thickness and fat content -- cheese chills more slowly than sauce -- record how long chilling or freezing takes when you have from one to 20 pizzas, as the heat load will also affect the figures. Expect as a starting point that it takes 60 to 90 minutes to freeze a large New York-style cheese pizza and as many as six hours for a Chicago-style pizza, Piliero said.
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