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A long, possibly folded, conveyer belt for the continuous production of pizza. Flour, water, oil and yeast would trickle into a small mixing chamber, and then onto a thin, continuously moving conveyer belt where it would be rolled flat before slowly moving through a 'proving' section of the belt. As
the strip moves along it passes through a baking chamber, is lightly brushed with olive oil, has tomato sauce spread on it, some pepperoni and mozzerella, and goes though a final bake, ultimately emerging on the moving belt at the mouth of the oven as a slowly moving, thin strip of delicious pizza which can be cut off to your preferred length.
I like the idea that the pizza you're just cutting off the end of the strip is connected to the uncooked dough at the other end. Also, for kitchen gadget fiends, you could make the mouth of the oven, where the conveyer belt emerges, look like an enormous tap, to give the impression you have pizza 'on tap'.
Conveyor Toasters
http://www.valera.co.uk/cat.asp?catID=20
Kind of like these... but not. [Jinbish, May 20 2009]
Robot spinning pizza
http://www-hh.mech....botics/index_e.html
The interaction with non-ridgid objects is solved. [loonquawl, May 20 2009]
Helical_20Pizza
[hippo, May 21 2009]
Pizza vending machine
http://www.youtube....watch?v=Di5HCuFQn-k
[fridge duck, May 22 2009]
[link]
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i took this to be a continuous pizza oven, while in fact it is a continuous-pizza oven.... |
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the former is baked & baking, the latter is probably only a reprogramming of existing hardware away, but nevertheless very nice. The pizza could have smooth transitions from 'Hawaii' to 'Carbonara'. [+] |
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I'm not qualified to answer your idea - (original as it seems) - but I Do know that glass windows are made this way for heat conservation. |
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What is your idea for the minimum length of this restaurant? (Assuming no Chicago deep-dish...) Two football fields? Three? |
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I guess the length of the oven would depend on the intended meter per minute output. As pizza needs ~10 minutes baking, the oven would need to be 10meters long for every meter per minute output - With a normal oven of ~0.5 meters, this could achieve 5cm pizza per minute - perhaps the required dough-maker & toppings sprinkler could be sold as an add-on for normal ovens... |
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[loonquawl]: I'm glad that you're doing the math - (especially because [hippo]'s idea seems to have the seminole energy to be something big) - but //As pizza needs ~10 minutes baking, the oven would need to be 10meters long for every meter per minute output// doesn't ... make a lot of sense for calculating pizza rate. maybe I'm missing something? |
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Possibly i missed something - the thinking was thus: If you want one meter of pizza to come out every minute, this means the belt has to move the pizza by one meter every minute. If one spot of the pizza needs to be in the oven for 10 minutes, this means the belt-through-oven length needs to be 10 meters. If the belt is straight, this calls for a 10 meter oven. |
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Ah- i just got(?) the joke. You wanted to point out meter is not a metre? My first language is german, where 'metre' it is 'Meter', while 'meter' is '-zähler' so i tend to mix that up a lot. 'become' is another such pitfall: 'bekommen' means 'to get', while 'become' is 'werden'. Most of the time the closeness of the two languages is a boon, but then stuff like that happens... |
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You could do some sort of Yo! Sushi conveyor belt affair with this I'm sure. |
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Make a "smooth transitions" continuous pizza (a loonquawl pizza gradient if you will) and slice off strips as they emerge onto plates on a conveyor. Customers can choose between Siciliana, Pepperoni or cusp of Napoletana and Marinara. |
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Yes the conveyor belt would be pretty long. To save space, you may want to 'fold' it, so the pizza ribbon goes up and down as it goes through the oven part of the process. Of course, this would have to be combined with a high-addhesion tomato sauce to stop the pepperoni falling off. |
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There could be a number of doughy streams - like a veritable rainbow of Italian comestibility! |
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[21_Quest]: All the crusts you mentioned (with the possible exception of 'hand-tossed') can be made by machines (frightfully simple ones) |
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producing something 'hand-tossed' with a machine is philosophically tricky... , but technically baked (see [link]) |
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I suspect dough would have to be made in batches, simply
because kneading would be difficult to do in a continuous
process (not impossible, just very difficult). It would be
entirely possible, however, to have several different batches
in process so they reach the final roll out as needed. Each
one is extruded such that it joins up with the tail end of the
batch before. |
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One of the restaurants I worked in (long ago) had a conveyer belt pizza oven.
I always thought it was energy wasteful because there were no doors on it. |
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I hope you don't mind, but this idea inspired me to post something related. |
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To address a few of the problems mentioned, firstly for the sake of both space and heat conservation the machine could be a spiral.
Provided the pizza follows a uniform curvature all the way around, the barriers of the conveyor belt shouldn't hamper its movement in any way. Plus, as heat rises, the same energy can be recycled and thus reduce overall energy input.
The beauty of this design is that as the pizza strip has a larger outer circumference, roughly triangular (/rhomboid?) slices can be cut from the pizza-tap area by means of a single slicer.
Following on from [loonquawl]'s metre/minute output suggestion, my very basic calculations/assumptions for a pizza slice of length 20cm (edge to point) suggest you could probably get away with a spiral machine of diameter 100cm and height 3.2h, where h is the height of any given area of the oven at which pizza is cooked. |
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Depending on how pizza has to be cooked (is it due to being in the heated air? or is it to do with direct exposure to radiated heat?), the entire spiral conveyor belt may need only be contained within the one oven enclosure, making the contraption shorter still. |
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As for the problem of a constant dough input, I envision something along the lines of a sausage-making machine. By virtue of a dough reservoir, a continuous stream of the dough can be put into the machine as it works. |
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Edit: Read spiral as helical. |
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//To save space, you may want to 'fold' it// the human anatomy has a neat method in the intestinal system... |
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[fridge] - Excellent idea - I assume you mean 'helical' rather than 'spiral' though. |
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Back in my dim, distant past, when I delivered pizza for a living, I starting thinking along similar lines to fully automate the pizza production process.
My concept was more a high speed batch process rather than a continuous process, utilising a 'flash bake' oven to cook the pizza in ~30 sec or so.
My theory was to get a pizza from order to cut-and-boxed inside 2 minutes.
But I do like this concept. [+] |
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Apologies, helical was indeed the word I was looking for. |
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//To save space, you may want to 'fold' it// |
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"We have just folded space from Ix... Many pizzas on Ix. New pizzas." |
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Oh wow - helical pizza is an idea well worthy of its own posting! |
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So much so, in fact, that someone's already posted it (see link). |
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I can imagine that there are not too many geometric arrangements (even in four dimentions) of food or soap that have not been covered, at least once, in the 'bakery. |
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Which side would like the topping on, Ian? |
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This would be good for storing pre-baked pizza on a large roll... similar to how carpeting is stored. |
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I'm picturing this in a high-foot-traffic area, and
vary the pizza price by demand. The longer the
line, the higher the price. That way the customer
demand would be fit to the speed of production.
At noon you'd have over-market prices. At 9am
you'd charge a bit more than what the raw
ingredients cost you. A large sign out front lists
the current price. If you still can't attract
customers at off-peak times, then slices are
frozen for
take-home sales. |
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[World] - interesting, and if the queue ran alongside the machine, and the width of the pizza ribbon was such that the average distance between one person and the next in the queue was also the length of pizza that the average person would order, then the people queueing (it's rare for an English word to have 5 consecutive vowels) would follow 'their' bit of pizza from dough to delicious crunchy, cheesy goodness down the entire length of the machine. |
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And if the machine and line were set up that way,
you could order toppings just like you'd order a
sandwich - an employee would have toppings
sitting in little bins, and you'd point to what you
want. She would then place these ingredients on
your slice before it enters the baking section. |
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Whoops...looks like we ran outta cheese today... |
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and the little boy sobs, " but momma, it always
runs out when I want some". |
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"Don't be greedy son, you'll get some hot fresh
sort of continuous cheese pizza tomorrow young
sir. All
that you can eat indeed." |
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+1 bun for the phrase 'pizza 'on tap' I just dissed the 'cylindrical pizza' but with the idea of a cylidrical continuous pizza coming from a tap and served like sausages might be interesting. ha! |
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can I roll it into a ribbon and thinly slice the roll for a 20 foot pizza roll? |
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This device MUST be made. Immediately. |
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Have you any idea what it's like when the Borg Collective orders in pizza ? Just getting rid of the boxes is bad enough. |
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[8th_of_7] Atttractive as I found the idea of pizza-baking
as a continuous, rather than a batch manufacturing
process, I saw a problem in the fact that demand
fluctuates. What could you do with your excess
production at four o'clock in the morning? (Frozen pizza is,
of course, unconscionable in principle.) The Borg
Collective has solved that problem, with it's high and
consistent consumption. (I assume you can supply
continuous-feed matter transmitters to distribute product
throughout the galaxy?) |
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bun for feeding the collective. |
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think World has added the final logical step to this,
you've essentially created the pizza version of
subway and that can only be a good thing |
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I always like to think battenburg cake is continuously
extruded in a manner similar to this |
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So you have never been to a meeting of the Battenberg End Eaters? Their formal dinners make the Masons and the Burns clubs pale into embarrasment. |
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