I happen to have recently turned 160kg of flour, 100kg of tomato sauce, 70kg of mozzarella cheese and 160kg of various toppings into pizza over the span of five days (with many helping hands) at a Dutch hacker camp, SHA2017. See
https://twitter.com/pizzahackery for some nice pictures etc. We had a used 14.4kw (yup, 14,400W) electric oven. Some of our observations:
- Letting dough rest really makes a difference. I know, it requires planning etc and I'm impatient and I don't really do it at home either. The best batches we had had risen for 30min outside and then ~20h in the fridge (or in our case, a cooling truck). Even more time would likely help, two to three days seems to be the agreed-upon number, but we didn't have the storage capacity for that. You also don't need a whole lot of yeast when doing that, we used various amounts but 75g dried yeast was plenty for 10kg of flour with a slow rise.
- Quality flour makes a difference, too. We tried several from the cheapest supermarket flour (32ct/kg) to some really nice organic stoneground flour (~1.3€/kg) and the latter is nicer to knead and makes for a better crust. I was sceptical, too (flour is flour, right?), but it really does make a difference if you're going for maximum yummies.
- Oven temperature is important. Whatever your oven's max temperature is, go for that (unless it's a pottery oven), and use a pizza stone or something (and let it heat up for a while), it adds thermal capacity, i.e. the oven won't cool down as much when you put in the pizza. We bought a used pizza oven (picture: https://twitter.com/leonhandreke/status/893173017722982400) that reaches 500°C (930°F), which is pretty impossible at home, but that allowed us to scale the whole thing. At that temperature, pizza takes around 4 minutes to cook (on a screen, less if you put it on the stones directly, but that's a logistical nightmare with 60x80 cm pizzas) and it's perfect. You get the nice browning of the crust without burning the cheese, and the base isn't soggy.
- Sauce is cheap, cheese isn't. For the sauce, either use polpa fine (quite nice) or passata / sieved tomatoes thickened with some tomato paste. Add oregano and basil.
- We didn't have the time and skill to throw the pizza, we rolled it out. Our trays are 60x80 cm so throwing would have been very different. It was still very nice. Maybe throwing would have taken it up another notch, but it wasn't possible for us.
It was an amazing project and people loved it. We gave it away as free pizza with a donations box and the sum of donations exceeded our expectations. We're donating the entire surplus to the EFF, we still have to return some equipment (outstanding deposits), but it's going to be a sizeable amount. A+ experience, would make pizza for hackers again. Maybe I should write an account of the whole operation and post it :)