Half a croissant, on a plate, with a sign in front of it saying '50c'
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Continuous Pizza Oven

  (+34, -1)(+34, -1)(+34, -1)
(+34, -1)
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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'.
hippo, May 20 2009

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]


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Annotation:







       i took this to be a continuous pizza oven, while in fact it is a continuous-pizza oven....   

       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'. [+]
loonquawl, May 20 2009
  

       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.   

       What is your idea for the minimum length of this restaurant? (Assuming no Chicago deep-dish...) Two football fields? Three?
Speed Razor, May 20 2009
  

       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...
loonquawl, May 20 2009
  

       [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?
Speed Razor, May 20 2009
  

       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.   

       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...
loonquawl, May 20 2009
  

       You could do some sort of Yo! Sushi conveyor belt affair with this I'm sure.   

       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.
wagster, May 20 2009
  

       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.
hippo, May 20 2009
  

       There could be a number of doughy streams - like a veritable rainbow of Italian comestibility!
Jinbish, May 20 2009
  

       [21_Quest]: All the crusts you mentioned (with the possible exception of 'hand-tossed') can be made by machines (frightfully simple ones)   

       producing something 'hand-tossed' with a machine is philosophically tricky... , but technically baked (see [link])
loonquawl, May 20 2009
  

       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.
MechE, May 20 2009
  

       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.
  

       I hope you don't mind, but this idea inspired me to post something related.
Zimmy, May 20 2009
  

       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.   

       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.   

       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.   

       Edit: Read spiral as helical.
fridge duck, May 20 2009
  

       //To save space, you may want to 'fold' it// the human anatomy has a neat method in the intestinal system...
po, May 20 2009
  

       [fridge] - Excellent idea - I assume you mean 'helical' rather than 'spiral' though.
hippo, May 20 2009
  

       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. [+]
neutrinos_shadow, May 20 2009
  

       Apologies, helical was indeed the word I was looking for.
fridge duck, May 20 2009
  

       //To save space, you may want to 'fold' it//   

       "We have just folded space from Ix... Many pizzas on Ix. New pizzas."
wagster, May 21 2009
  

       Oh wow - helical pizza is an idea well worthy of its own posting!
zen_tom, May 21 2009
  

       So much so, in fact, that someone's already posted it (see link).
hippo, May 21 2009
  

       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.
4whom, May 21 2009
  

       Which side would like the topping on, Ian?
wagster, May 22 2009
  

       This would be good for storing pre-baked pizza on a large roll... similar to how carpeting is stored.
Jscotty, May 22 2009
  

       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.
Worldgineer, May 22 2009
  

       [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.
hippo, May 23 2009
  

       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.
Worldgineer, May 23 2009
  

       Whoops...looks like we ran outta cheese today...   

       and the little boy sobs, " but momma, it always runs out when I want some".   

       "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."
blissmiss, May 23 2009
  

       +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!
rossgk, May 31 2009
  

       can I roll it into a ribbon and thinly slice the roll for a 20 foot pizza roll?
Voice, Aug 17 2010
  

       This device MUST be made. Immediately.   

       Have you any idea what it's like when the Borg Collective orders in pizza ? Just getting rid of the boxes is bad enough.
8th of 7, Aug 17 2010
  

       [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?)
mouseposture, Aug 17 2010
  

       bun for feeding the collective.
Voice, Aug 19 2010
  

       Greatest. idea. ever! XD
mr_bigmouth_502, Aug 19 2010
  

       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
ComatoseSheep, Aug 20 2010
  

       I always like to think battenburg cake is continuously extruded in a manner similar to this
stupop, Jul 02 2014
  

       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.
pocmloc, Jul 03 2014
  


 

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