Cooking Wood Fired Pizzas for Large Events

Can a wood fired pizza truck serve a large event? The short answer is yes, within reason.

The longer answer is worth having, because a truck at a two hundred person wedding works differently from the same truck at a Saturday market. Here is what actually happens, and what we need from you to make it work.

The oven can be a bottleneck

A twelve-inch Neapolitan pizza in a wood-fired oven at full temperature cooks in about ninety seconds to two minutes, and the oven floor holds three or four at a time.

That does not add up to a hundred pizzas an hour. There is a ceiling. Knowing where it sits, and planning a service that stays under it, is most of what separates a truck that can cater from a truck that can trade at a market.

It also means the fire has to be ready long before anyone else is. The oven comes up over about two hours and then we maintain that heat, so lighting it is the first thing that happens on site and it is finished long before anybody is hungry. That is why we arrive hours early.

We need a firm guest count

The other thing we need well before the day is a real number of people.

Dough cannot be hurried. Ours runs 32 to 38 hours at minimum and usually closer to 48: a poolish fermenting overnight, a mix, a bulk ferment, hand-balling, hours at room temperature and then a long cold ferment. The whole process is written out here.

So the count you give us is the count we make dough for, and we make it two days before your event rather than on it. We always bring extra, and we would much rather carry dough home than run short. Extra has a limit, though, and a firm number is what keeps that limit comfortably out of reach. Give us the figure you actually expect.

Efficiency inside the truck

A truck is a small space, and how many pizzas an hour come out of it depends on how carefully that space is worked. Stretching, topping and firing happen in sequence, and everything that can be prepped before service is prepped before service: dough warmed and counted, toppings portioned, the fire settled.

During service almost nothing is being decided. The decisions were made in the week beforehand. What is left is repetition, which is what you want when a hundred and fifty people are waiting.

Holding, which is where most catered pizza dies

At larger events, which for us is anything over 120 people, we cook and hold enough pizzas to stay ahead of the room. That is deliberate. Building a stock of cooked pizza is what keeps us from falling behind, and it is what keeps your guests’ wait short.

So the question is not whether pizza waits. It is what it waits in.

The usual answer is a humidified holding cabinet, and it is the wrong one for pizza. Moisture keeps most foods from drying out, which is why those cabinets exist, and it is precisely what ruins a crust. Steam softens the base. Twenty minutes in a humid box and a good pizza has become a limp one.

We hold with dry heat instead. Hot, no added moisture, so the crust keeps its structure while the pizza stays at temperature.

And we have tested our warmer to the extreme. A pizza held for an hour and a half, far longer than we would ever need to hold one at an event, came out at around 95 percent of the quality it had straight from the oven. At the 20 to 45 minutes a real service asks of it, the gap is smaller still.

Service style changes the arithmetic too

How the food reaches people is as much a throughput decision as a stylistic one.

An all-you-can-eat buffet is usually the best choice at around 140 guests and above. Dinner does get announced, but tables are typically released a few at a time, or guests pace themselves without being asked, so a long line rarely forms and the one that does keeps moving.

Family style avoids lines completely. Whole pizzas are carried to the tables and nobody stands up. It suits events up to around 140 people, twelve tables of twelve for example. It does ask for more staff and more coordination: somebody has to carry those pizzas, and that means 8 to 10 people moving at the same time. We cannot supply them, though we will help you organize them.

We will tell you which one suits your headcount and your venue rather than leaving it as a preference question.

Why does all of this matter?

We want your guests eating as quickly as possible. Pizza is cooked on site, so it will always be a little slower than buffet food that was cooked somewhere else hours earlier. That is the trade, and we would rather say so.

Which is why we have thought about everything that helps us serve faster: preplanning, a great deal of practice stretching and building pizzas, an oven hot enough to cook a pizza in ninety seconds, and a good, tested, dry holding cabinet. Together they mean your guests get hot pizza without an excessive wait.

Ask us about your event

Send the type of event, the date, the location with city and state, the start time and how long you need us, and your estimated guest count. We can cater events from 50 to 275, and sometimes more or less, and we cover Tennessee from Nashville to Chattanooga and from Fayetteville across to Crossville.

Details are on the catering page, and the menu is here.