And all the toppings

One large pizza with pepperoni and mushrooms, and hold the anchovies.

Every day, Tim Sessions, sophomore in business administration and the owner of Logan’s 5-Buck Pizza gets up for classes at 7:30 a.m. This may sound like a normal college student schedule, but his class is early so he can head into his pizza business at 9 a.m., when he begins prepping. Before the business opens at 11 a.m., Sessions said he makes dough, first thing. 5-Buck Pizza makes its dough fresh every morning, which requires extra time on his part, Sessions said.

“We make the dough fresh,” he said. “It makes a mess to roll our own dough, but making dough is where the magic begins.”

Sessions said his employees put a lot of work into making the dough, usually making 350 to 500 pizza crusts per day.

“The dough is the most important part of the pizza because without the crust, you can’t put the toppings anywhere,” he said.

At 10 a.m., one of his employees comes in to help Sessions with the rest of the preparation for the day, he said.

“After the dough is done, we prep the rest of the food,” Sessions said. “We cut up fresh veggies every day and we take out the meats to be ready for business.”

After the business opens, Sessions and his crew take their first orders of the day. As customers order, their information is printed on a ticket which prints out near the make table. The ticket is taken by the makers and posted in front of them while they make the pizzas and quickly move the ticket down the line. After the crew prepares the pizza, they place it in the oven to cook, Sessions said. The oven, which is set to 430 degrees, is actually one of the fastest-cooking ovens for pizza, he said, with cooking time averaging about three minutes and 40 seconds.

“(The ovens) can cook anywhere between 400 and 500 pizzas an hour,” he said.

With the oven being set that high, someone is likely to get burned, something Sessions says has happened frequently to him since he started making pizzas when he was 15.

“I burn myself all the time on the oven,” Sessions said. “My hand almost doesn’t have feeling in it anymore from pulling out so many pizzas.”

Aside from the occasional burn from the oven, Sessions said being a pizza maker is one of the most enjoyable jobs around because of the laid-back environment and all the pizza the workers get to eat.

“I have to pace myself sometimes with all the pizza there is to eat,” Sessions said. “I won’t eat pizza for a few days so I don’t ruin it for myself.”

Sessions said because there are so many different kinds of pizza, if he does start to get sick of a certain type of pizza, he just makes a different kind since there are so many possibilities.

With all the different combinations available, Sessions said his favorite pizza is the “Meat Monster” offered by 5-Buck Pizza. The pizza has double pepperoni, double Canadian bacon, double sausage and extra cheese. But Sessions said the most commonly ordered pizza, even with the free toppings offered by 5-Buck Pizza, is still pepperoni.

“I don’t think people who order pepperoni pizza every time are boring, but I do think they should experience more toppings,” Sessions said. “People don’t know what kind of good pizza they can make until they start adding more toppings.”

Sessions said he thinks the pizza market is really focused right now on one-topping pizzas and he would like to change that.

“Everyone is marketing one-topping pizzas and so people just try one-topping pizza,” Session said. “I think here at 5-Buck, we are really opening up the possibility of trying different things. People are going to try combinations they normally wouldn’t try because our toppings are free.”

Even with all the free pizza he gets from working at a pizza place, Sessions said being a pizza maker does have its stressful moments, especially when a lot of orders come in at the same time. Staying on top of things is key, he said.

“The most difficult part of an actual pizza maker’s job is being able to make a lot of orders quickly and being able to multitask,” Sessions said.

When all the orders do get filled, they are pulled out of the oven and put into boxes, Sessions said.

“We don’t prefold our boxes,” Sessions said. “We fold them up around the pizzas, then we put them in the pizza bags and either set them on the shelf to wait for pick up or send them out with our drivers.”

Sessions said the goal of the drivers is to safely get the pizza to the customer as fast as possible.

“Our drivers get the pizza to you as fast as they can without breaking any laws,” he said.

-debrajoy.h@aggiemail.usu.edu