There are plenty of very good reasons to go to Costco — too many to list, as a matter of fact. You know that when a store offers literal buckets of mac and cheese it's a place you should definitely be shopping. But there's also the food court to consider, which should be at the very top of your list of reasons to frequent the warehouse store.
While most everything the Costco food court sells is utterly delicious, and though they're arguably most famous for their $1.50 hot dog and soda combo, it's their pizza that's tops. Somehow, someway, a store known for bargain-priced bulk toilet paper and $5 rotisserie chickens has managed to make pizza that's tastier than actual pizzerias.
How do they do it? Turns out, aside from copious amount of cheese and toppings, the Costco food court employs not only humans, but robots, too, to crank out their oh-so-tasty pies. Starting from an unassuming ball of dough, and ending with that ginormous finished product, here's exactly how Costco pizza is made.
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All pizza has to start with great dough, right? But most of us can think back to a visit to the so-called best pizzeria in the neighborhood, only to be disappointed by the crust. Sometimes it's too thick, sometimes it's too thin, sometimes it's too doughy, sometimes it's too crispy. Basically, if you're Goldilocks, the Costco food court is the place for you because their crust is just right.
According to Thrillist, Costco purchases their dough from a New York distributor — Brooklyn-based to be exact — who delivers the dough daily. So not only do you know it's super fresh, you also know it's legit (if you're a fan of New York-style pizza, anyway — fans of deep dish Chicago-style, maybe keep moving). Once the warehouse stores get the dough, it's rested and proofed, and Kaiwen Zhao, a supervisor at Costco, explained in a Quora thread that taking the time with those steps is a big part of the pizza's overall success. We spend a lot of time on dough management, it normally takes 24–27 hours for a dough to be ready to press, he said.
After the dough is lovingly tended to for a day, it's time to head to what we like to call the dough squisher (which is surely its technical name). This contraption takes a ball of already-made dough, and in seconds transforms it into a perfect pizza crust.
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What's the big deal? Well, for starters, it takes the potential opportunity to mishandle the dough out of the equation, which almost guarantees a better, tastier crust — when a machine is doing the work for you, there are no variables. But this squishing device doesn't just flatten the pizza dough with sheer force, it actually uses some heat to get the job done. According to Thrillist, the plates flatten the dough for seven seconds under 130 degrees of heat. This minimal but effective temperature guarantees the dough is squished into submission, and means it will be the just-right thickness every time.
Once the pizza dough is placed onto the pan, it's minimally handled but still needs to be stretched to fit. So far, this is pretty standard in the pizza-making biz, right? But at this point, a Costco food court employee will take one more very important step (with the help of a specialty tool) to ensure the finished product is nice and flat, and not full of giant air bubbles that disrupt the crucial sauce to cheese to crust ratio.
The tool is called a dough docker, and it's vital to making the Costco pizza we all know and love. It's a medieval-looking spiked roller, and the contraption gets rolled across and around the pizza dough, leaving indentations everywhere it touches, and more importantly, popping any air bubbles that linger. Once those offensive bubbles are eliminated, the crust is free to bake more evenly. Skip this step and your Costco slice might have one giant empty air pocket in the middle, which, needless to say, is not optimal.
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Okay, let's recap: So far we know that the dough itself, the dough squisher, and the dough docker are all of utmost importance in the Costco pizza-making process. But there's one more dough-centric piece of the puzzle that makes the warehouse store's pies what they are, and that's the pizza pan itself. You can love and massage pizza dough all you want, but the kind of pan you cook that pie in matters.
Costco uses pizza pans with holes, otherwise known as perforated pans, and these holes allow the crust to bake up crispier thanks to two things: 1. Rather than solid metal grabbing all the heat, the holes ensure that it transfers directly to the crust. 2. The holes allow moisture to escape out the bottom, rather than sog up the crust, and lets the entire thing cook evenly. And, as an added bonus, pizzas baked on perforated pans cook faster.
As a contrast, solid pans would produce a pizza with a chewier crust than those baked on perforated pans, and they might even prevent the toppings from cooking properly thanks to uneven heat distribution.
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It's hard to find much wrong in Costco's streamlined pizza-making process, but if we're to believe everything we read on the internet, the food court's treatment of those pizza pans might give you a little pause.
According to one Redditor who was asked if they would still eat at the food court given all their inside knowledge of any questionable practices, there was one thing that came to mind. Some people have hangups about the fact that we don't wash our pizza discs every time we use them, they spilled.
Is this really a big deal, though? If you're a carnivore, there's obviously no concern of gross meat juices adulterating your cheese pie, but vegetarians probably won't love the idea. The obvious concern is if you have an allergy to one of the toppings that even a trace amount of could set off. If you're not a vegetarian and you don't have allergies but are in the it's just gross not to wash pans camp, think of it like a baking sheet — when you're making cookies, you don't wash the trays in between, do you?
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Did you think we were kidding when we said Costco employs robots in their pizza-making process? We weren't. And this automated saucing machine just so happens to be the coolest step in the whole process.
How's it work? Once the pizza dough is squished and docked, the prepared pan gets placed onto the sauce robot by a human food court employee (see, we're still needed). At the push of a button, the contraption spins the pan around and spits out sauce in a very precise stream as its arm moves towards the center of the pie. The result is a kind of spin art effect on the dough, and while it's mesmerizing to watch, the reality is that the robot not only ensures that just the right amount of sauce is on each and every pizza, it also ensures that the right amount of sauce is equally distributed. This means that you're never going to bite into a slice and get a huge mouthful of sauce, nor will you get a dry bite. Win, win.
We may not have Costco's official confirmation of what's in their sauce, but we can assume that a product sold by Costco
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According to one shopper who posted to PizzaMaking.com's forum, at one time Costco's pizza sauce was sold in its Business Centers. These ginormous boxes of concentrate contained six 108-ounce packets of sauce, which were each to be mixed with 82 ounces of water for a total of 1, 140 ounces of that glorious sauce for just $19.99. But we don't really care about how much it would cost to make it at home, right? We care about what's in the sauce that tops our favorite pizza.
It's pretty basic: tomato puree (tomato paste and water), sugar, citric acid, spices, dehydrated garlic, salt, and spice extractive. The distinct flavor of Costco's pizza sauce clearly comes from some unlisted spices and extractives, but we're not mad at them for keeping it a secret — at $1.99 per slice and $9.95 per pie, it's hard to beat Costco's value, even when you consider the low cost of homemade pizza.
Even if you've never had the pleasure of enjoying a slice of Costco pizza, which completely dwarfs the paper plate it's served on at the food court, you can tell with just one glance that it's got some serious heft to it. And anyone who's ever hoisted one up will confirm that what you suspected is true: Those slices do indeed weigh a ton.
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There's the crust and cheese, of course, but the toppings — especially on the combo variety — are no joke. According to the Costco Connection, the combo pizza comes complete with Italian sausage, pepperoni, and a medley of sliced green bell peppers, red onions, mushrooms, and black olives. Pretty standard, right? But here's where it gets impressive: The finished pizza weighs
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