How to Make 1,000 Pizzas

Wine tasting is hungry business. A couple years back, we suddenly realized our customers were famished! At the time, on Closson Road there were only a couple of food options. If we were going to give people to best winery experience possible, we had to feed them. After all, the world is a better place when you have a full belly.

Get inspired

“Let’s open a pizza oven!” Tim exclaimed one afternoon.

“There are already lots of wineries that offer pizza,” Micheline said, “We should try something different!”

Tim agreed. How could we be special if we did the same thing as everyone else? So we debated other ideas — gourmet mac and cheese, poutine, flatbreads, hot dogs, smoked ribs. In the end we kept circling around to pizza.

“There’s a reason why so many wineries offer pizza. That’s what people want, and it works. Wine tastes good with pizza, pizza tastes good with wine.”

Take the plunge

We ordered the largest residential pizza oven we could find. It arrived the next day on the back of a transport truck. We assembled the stand and moved the heavy oven into place with our forklift. Not having ever made wood fired pizza before, we were intimidated by the big oven. We had the idea that if we bought a pizza oven, a whole new pizza dimension would naturally appear to our business, out of the blue. But it just sat there, unused, for more than a month. Turns out it took a lot more than buying the oven.

Professional help arrives!

One late summer afternoon, Keirra, the newly hired chef at The Grange Winery, happened by for a wine tasting.

“Wow, is that a pizza oven? Are you guys making pizza?” she asked. We shrugged. “I will teach you how to make pizza!” she exclaimed.

The next day she popped over with her colleague Jessa. They showed us how to mix and knead a batch of pizza dough and then ball it up. We put the dough balls in the fridge to ferment for 24 hours, and Keirra and Jessa went home and we went to bed.

The next evening, they reappeared, loaded with samples of the finest pizza toppings, home made sauce and a ball of mozzarella. We fired up the pizza oven and they taught us how to stretch the dough balls. We all had a pizza feast that night.

That whole summer of 2022 we practiced making dough and experimented with different pizza toppings. Then harvest came and went and the snow flew. We had the oven the whole summer and hadn’t made a single pizza for a customer.

Staff up!

Jokingly at our family Christmas Tim mentioned our pizza oven and recruited Nephew Jon to work as the first pizzaiolo in the not-yet-existent pizza business. Now we were committed!

You need an approved kitchen

Spurred into action by Jon’s impending arrival for his summer pizza job at the winery, we purchased a food trailer so we could have a clean, health-approved area to make our pizzas. On Facebook Marketplace Tim found an ugly-duckling food trailer that had a former life as a BBQ PIT. In one end of the trailer there is an enormous smoker. The rest of it is an air conditioned food prep area with three sinks, a stainless steel table, a refrigerator, and an ingredients table. Perfect! For $15,000 we had most of the things we needed to get started.

County bylaws require a health inspection, a fire inspection, and an electrical inspection to get a food truck permit. We also needed a food handlers course. And $400 for the permit. We had to wire in a 50 amp receptacle and bought a beefy 50 foot extension cord to power the pizza trailer.

After a week and a flurry of meetings with various inspectors, we received the email that our food truck permit was approved. We were in business!

To make large quantities of dough, you need a good mixer. Keirra found a good used 20 quart mixer for $800 on Facebook Marketplace. We drove two and a half hours to Orangeville to pick it up, and loaded it into the back of our Subaru Forester. And we got all the way back to the County when we turned a corner a little too quickly and the mixer tipped over into the back window. The back window shattered in an explosion of glass that sounded like a shotgun.

Replacing the broken rear window added $400 to the overall acquisition cost of the mixer. With the time to drive back and forth, plus gas, we didn’t save much compared with just ordering a brand new mixer, but these things happen.

Differentiate your offering

There is amazing pizza being made in the County.  The bar is high. But we think we found our niche. Our pizza is made in the Neapolitan style, an art form which is blessed by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage. There are specific rules to follow as directed by Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana. It’s hard core pizza making!

We made only three simple pizzas using the freshest locally sourced ingredients. Margherita ($18), Pesto with Artichoke Hearts ($20), and Coppa di Parma with green peppers and tomato sauce ($22). We made our own dough following the Neapolitan pizza guidelines, four ingredients only – “OO” flour, yeast, salt, and water – with a 24 to 48 hour ferment. Our simple sauce was made in-house with fresh garlic and San Marzano type tomatoes. For the last half of the summer we sourced fresh San Marzano tomatoes grown in the County by Campbell’s Orchards. For cheese, we used only fresh buffalo mozzarella, locally sourced from “”The Buff Stuff”, a water buffalo farm 15 minutes north of Belleville.

Practice makes perfect

At first, stretching the dough was challenging. The dough balls shrank into a puck as soon as we stretched them, or when we stretched the dough our thumbs poked holes in it. We just couldn’t figure it out. It looked so easy on Youtube.

Over a hundred of pizzas later, we nailed it. Our beautiful soft dough balls stretched easily, and we hand stretched nice round pizza doughs in a couple of seconds.

The first couple of days of service were a steep learning curve, but we soon became proficient at managing our pizza oven. Nephew Jon learned remarkably quickly and became a fantastic pizzaiolo. If you’ve ever had neapolitan style pizza, you know it’s all about getting the perfect crust.  Jon baked the perfect golden crust with tiny leopard spots every time.

The Launch

In late June we had a soft opening with no advertising. We didn’t want to advertise pizza until we got our game together. And we didn’t want people just coming for pizza. After all, this is supposed to be a winery, not a pizza joint. Pizza is supposed to be a service we provide to enhance the winery experience for our customers.

We put the three varieties of pizza on our menu and hand-lettered a sign to place at the road. Then we fired up the wood oven in view of all our customers to entice them with delicious aromas and waited for the orders to come in.

People loved our pizzas! What a pleasure to create food for people.

After eight weeks we sold pizza # 1,000! A good landmark to celebrate. We awarded our 1,000th customer with a free t-shirt and their group ate for free.

Pizza making is a real joy — almost as fun as growing grapes and making wine. With a new, better pizza oven and some advertising things are really going to take off. Alas, at time of writing this, it’s December and the oven is closed.

We can hardly wait until Spring when we reopen the oven and start baking those beautiful pizzas once again.

Hope you can join us!