“ You don’t need to pile your pizza high with toppings to create a flavoursome, filling meal that customers will appreciate”

• Pizza requires only minimal training and labour, making it an ideal menu addition in these times of staff and skills shortages
• Cheese is an essential ingredient as it holds the pizza toppings together on the base, as well as imparting a distinctive mouthfeel
• Dairy Farmers Shredded Mozzarella is the perfect time-saving base cheese, and you can also experiment with other cheeses to further enhance flavour

With staff and skills shortages a fact of life in today’s foodservice market, chefs and foodservice professionals are looking to meal solutions which deliver consistent results while cutting down on labour and prep time.

Pizza is a great menu addition in this respect – it’s relatively easy to prepare, requiring only minimal training and labour, especially when you’re using a pre-made base. And if you are judicious with your choice of quality ingredients, you’ll find that “less is more” – meaning you don’t need to pile your pizza high with toppings to create a flavoursome, filling meal that customers will appreciate. This makes pizza a cost-effective choice as well as a time-saving one.

The first step in creating a tasty pizza is to decide on your choice of cheese. This is an essential ingredient as it holds the pizza toppings together on the base, as well as imparting that distinctive mouthfeel that customers associate as a key component of the pizza dining experience.

Mozzarella is the traditional choice for pizza cheese, and good quality mozzarella is easy to identify because of its stretch, browning properties and pleasantly soft mouthfeel.  And when it comes to pizza, a pre-shredded Mozzarella is a terrific time-saving choice, further cutting down on your labour and prep time.

All of which makes a mildly flavoured, white style mozzarella like Dairy Farmers Shredded Mozzarella the perfect choice for pizza. It will bubble and stretch when heated, ensuring consistent golden caramelisation and delicious texture and taste.

Complement but never overwhelm

It’s also important that your choice of Mozzarella will complement, but never overwhelm, the flavours of your other ingredients – and again, Dairy Farmers Shredded Mozzarella fits the bill.

And thanks to its high moisture content and low fat, it melts smoothly with minimal oiling off, ensuring there are no unsightly pools of oil on your finished pizza. This also means you can put your pizza in a delivery box secure in the knowledge it will arrive at the customer’s home looking as good as when it left your premises.

You can also experiment with other cheeses to further enhance the flavours of your pizzas – for example blending Mozzarella with Dairy Farmers Shredded Tasty Cheddar, with its rich, sharp flavour, to add an extra tang to your base cheese. Dairy Farmers Shredded Parmesan is also a terrific choice to add flavour notes, whether sprinkled over your pizza toppings or even added into your pizza base to impart a distinctive signature taste.