Madre uses an active liquid sourdough originating from Altamura in southern Italy, fed daily rather than supplied as an inactive powder. The dough is fermented for 48 hours and has a hydration level of approximately 80%. The company is targeting hotels, restaurants, pubs and caterers looking to reduce the staff time needed for kitchen preparation.
The range is designed to let operators serve Neapolitan-style pizza without a specialist chef. DoughLAB completes fermentation, stretching, topping and the first bake at its factory near Budapest, leaving staff to complete the final cooking stage after thawing.
Josep Zara, co-founder and chief executive of The DoughLAB, said: “We wanted to take the most difficult and unpredictable part of the process out of the restaurant and move it into a controlled environment. If the fermentation, stretching, ingredients and first bake can be controlled centrally, the restaurant team can concentrate on service instead of reproducing an entire specialist production process during every shift.”
The pizzas can be finished in approximately 2-2.5 minutes after thawing, in an oven preheated to 250-350°C. Each one is stretched and topped by hand, using ingredients including DOP San Marzano tomatoes, before being par-baked on volcanic stone at around 450°C. The dough and tomato sauce contain no additives or preservatives.
They then pass through a liquid-nitrogen freezing tunnel at DoughLAB’s 2000 sq m factory in Szigetszentmiklós. The cryogenic process freezes them rapidly, producing smaller ice crystals than slower freezing methods to help preserve the dough’s open structure and texture of the toppings.
The facility represents an investment of approximately 1.5 billion (£3.5bn) Hungarian forints and was designed for an initial capacity of around 27,000 pizzas a day, with scope to increase this to 100,000. Hand-stretching remains part of the production process at both volumes.
Zara added: “The easiest way to increase output would be to automate everything. But if you press this type of dough mechanically, you can destroy the structure that gives a Neapolitan pizza its characteristic rim. Working with living dough at this scale is difficult but that is exactly why we decided to keep hand-stretching as part of the process.”