Cooking4Fun
Senior Cook
Is it safe to say that most pizza places grease their pans with grease that is liquid at room temperature?
I think what Scott is trying to say is that most pizza places don't use 'Pans'. Pizzas are put into the ovens without anything under them other than the hot shelves already in there.
They are usually slid in and out with a pizza peel.
Traditionally a long handled flat paddle-like thing-a-me.
C4F, are you talking about deep dish pizza? I saved a recipe that claims to be like Pizzeria Uno's. Rather than oil the pan, the dough is oiled before rising. That probably gives the dough just enough slick to make it brown nicely in the pan. You can find the recipe here: Pizzeria Uno Chicago Deep Dish Pizza
If they use pans, it's still unlikely they would grease them. Putting fat on the bottom would cause them to burn pretty quickly. And the metal gets quite hot very fast. It's there to support the pizza, not protect it from heat.As far as I know in my area the pizzas are all on pans and the peel never touches raw dough. In fact the bottoms would burn if it had direct contact with the oven the whole time.
Dragnlaw, I think they also use cornmeal or something similar, to prevent the crust from sticking to the peel when they put the pizza into the oven.
Maybe they just grease them to slide the pizza to the oven when the top is cooked? I think without grease it wouldn't budge. We've had sheet pizzas not slide out into oven with too little grease in pan.