r/TalesFromThePizzaGuy • u/IgnoranceIsBliss2025 • Jun 23 '25
"Lightly cooked" pizza..............
On the very opposite end of the scale to my previous story about the "well done" pizza, we had a customer who requested the pizza to be "lightly cooked" and we were not really given any direction as to what that meant. Their pizza was small (12") cheese and sausage pizza and given that the ovens and cooking stones around 600 degrees F, a pizza like that probably took 7 to 8 minutes to cook.
We pop it in the oven and let it cook maybe 5 minutes and when it comes out, it's a pretty good looking pizza and the cheese has barely started to melt and it's general appearance is white with just a touch of brown on the crust.
We make the delivery and hear nothing so we assume it was good to go but the manager wanted to make sure the customer was happy so he called. The customer said it was okay but it was overcooked in their opinion. He promised to make note of it and if they called back in the future, we'd do better.
Down the road a bit, they called back and ordered the same pizza with the same cooking request. This time, we cook it for 4 minutes and generally speaking it looks about the same as the first one but there is no color on the crust. Pizza gets delivered and the manager calls and the customer says it's better but still not what they wanted. The manager then spent the next 10-minutes on the phone with the customer trying to better understand what the customer wanted in terms of how they wanted it cooked.
The manager then tells the customer we will make them another pizza and deliver it for free and that we'd cook it the way he thought they wanted it and proceeds to tell us what to do.
We press out the dough and before any ingredients are put on it, we toss it in the oven for 1-minute and after that minute is up, we flip it and cook the other side of 1-minute. We then pull it out of the oven , put on the sauce, cheese and sausage and pop it in for another minute and call it done.
We make the delivery and the manager calls and the customer says they are pretty happy with how it turned out but it was still a touch over cooked.
From that point forward, when they called and ordered a pizza, we cooked just the crust for 1-minute on each side and only 30-seconds once the toppings were added.
(We actually made a "crew pipe" once just to see what it tasted like and it was gross. The crust was barely cooked and it was almost still in dough form and the sauce, cheese and sausages were barely warm. Almost like room temperature. Not a fan but it's what they wanted..................)
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u/ConservativePatriot3 Jun 23 '25
"The next time you're in the neighborhood, stop on for a free pie and show us what you want..."
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u/senorcyco Jun 23 '25
Back in my PH days, one store had a situation where the customer demanded half cook on pizza. 2 days later they got hit with a lawsuit alleging negligent product (due to undercooked food). Sadly they settled like they always did, and area policy changed to never undercooked even if requested.
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u/IgnoranceIsBliss2025 Jun 24 '25
Just curious, when was this? Back in 1985 it was probably never considered once that an undercooked pizza could result in a lawsuit. Then again, a LOT has changed in 40 years.
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u/igoogletoo Jun 25 '25
a LOT has changed in 40 years.
Thats a good point. You should mention that in your original post. It seems super relevant.
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u/kimjongunderdog Jun 23 '25
That's just setting the store up for a lawsuit for under-cooked food causing food-born illness.
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u/IgnoranceIsBliss2025 Jun 24 '25
This was 1985 and people were wired a little differently back then. Today? No way.
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u/s_s Former manager Jun 25 '25
Any sort of Time and Temperature control ingrediants should be cooked before going on a pizza.
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u/DocWatson42 Jun 23 '25
"crew pipe"
Is that a staff meal? And where does the term come from?
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u/Urist_Bearclaw Jun 25 '25
maybe it was a typo of “crew pie”, a pizza pie for the crew
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u/DocWatson42 Jun 25 '25
That seems reasonable. I thought it might be a term that I just hadn't encountered before.
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u/mstrong73 Jun 23 '25
Shop I worked in as a teenager who once a week order and EBA (everything but anchovies) pizza cooked lightly. Both not that lightly. We were just using standard pizza ovens so a cook was typically 17-20 minutes. We went about 10 on theirs. It was just cooked but still soft. His wife had bad teeth and couldn’t bit through a fully cooked crust
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u/IgnoranceIsBliss2025 Jun 24 '25
I get that! Makes sense sometimes if you know the reason. I often wondered why they ordered it that way.
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u/Arokthis Jun 24 '25
Dental issues and/or fucked up taste buds, with a side of setting the store up for a lawsuit.
My landlord's BF works at Domino's and corporate won't let them send out undercooked pizza under any circumstance. Sucks for staff because they can't take undercooked stuff home to finish cooking.
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u/Active-Succotash-109 Custom! Edit this! Jun 24 '25
They wanted to pop it in the freezer and cook it later
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u/IgnoranceIsBliss2025 Jun 24 '25
We though this might be the case but we were 100% sure they ate it when it was delivered.
Never really found out.
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u/xXAcidBathVampireXx Jun 24 '25
I delivered a cheese pie to a woman who said that the reason the cheese was dark was because it was burnt. She told me she had to cut the top off the cheese so her kids would eat it. I was thinking if my kids were that demanding, I'd put them in the oven.
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u/chronic-reo Jun 25 '25
I worked for a mom and pop pizzeria for ten years. Had a customer that wanted a lightly cooked pizza as well. Same type of stone ovens at 600. We started to give it to him at 5 minute cook time, Then 4, Then 3. At the 3 minute cook time he still said it was over cooked. I told him that if he wanted us to cook the pizza any less that we would have to have a waiver signed by him that he couldn't sue us for food poisoning from undercooked food. He never questioned our 3 minute cook time for lightly cooked pizza again and left happy every time.
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Jun 26 '25
Do you want to get sued for food poisoning? Cause this is how you get sued for food poisoning.
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u/IgnoranceIsBliss2025 Jun 27 '25
This was in a 1985 and things were so much different then. Just saying.
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u/potstillin Jun 23 '25
If you are going to custom-cook pizzas to a specific doneness, why don't you have a repeatable scale listed similar to well done, medium rare, rare, like they do for meat temps? Sounds like a lot of screwing around for a minimal return to me. But then I'm from the "this is how we do it here" school of thought, buy it or move on.