Somewhere between sliding pie No. 19 into a waiting box, and nudging pie No. 20 six inches to the left in the 550-degree oven at Sexy Pizza, Angela Hilton touches a flour-dusted finger to a control panel and turbocharges the electrification movement.
Tweaking one button instantly cools a hot spot in Sexy Pizza’s 8-foot-wide, three-stack electric oven, far more effectively and efficiently than in the old natural gas pizza ovens that Hilton trained on. And in slinging 23 pies around the $55,000 oven on a Thursday morning using her forearms of steel, Hilton is a warrior in fighting climate change.
No fossil fuel burning equates to no greenhouse gases wafting out of Sexy Pizza’s Uptown cafe and contributing to a warming atmosphere.
“Plus they take, like, 15 minutes to heat up, which is really nice,” Hilton said. Sexy Pizza, now with four locations, used to keep some of its gas pizza ovens on all night to hold a steady temperature and be ready for a morning catering rush.
“Beneficial electrification” has come for automobiles, home furnaces, kitchen stoves, hot water heaters and more. Commercial kitchens are a new and active frontier in getting rid of the gas. Here’s how it happens, and how it’s going.
First, go to Vegas for the Pizza Expo
Sexy Pizza is employee-owned and buffeted by the usual challenges and opportunities of high-volume, quality fast food. Neighborhoods beg them to expand and open a new outlet. The whole crew wants to be environmentally responsible. Managers would like to save money on natural gas but not blow the budget on five-figure ovens.
Moving its Uptown outlet to a new spot at 1660 N. Pearl St. at the beginning of January was another good chance to try electric instead of gas, a switch already made at the South Pearl Street restaurant. Director of operations Kyle Peters heads to Las Vegas pizza expos to gauge new equipment, and a wave of smart electrics are showing up there.
Electric Avenue is an ongoing electrification showcase hosted by environmentally conscious restaurateurs as part of Good Business Colorado, a progressive commerce group. The group can help outlets like Sexy Pizza translate what they see in Las Vegas to a working kitchen line. Chef Andy Forlines, a consultant and educator, hosted an electrification demo for the group, cooking steaks at the latest National Western Stock Show, using the Colorado State University Spur campus kitchen.
Part of the teaching process, Forlines said, is overcoming longtime chef assumptions that a pizza crust or a T-bone needs an open flame to become just-so.
“It’s educating the people up to realize that they’re not giving up anything,” Forlines, whose training included the Broadmoor kitchens. “This food doesn’t really care what the heat source is.”
Second, go over the pros and cons
Upfront expense is always a big question, Forlines said. New electric ovens and stoves with elaborate computerization are often pricier than comparable gas commercial models, just as electric vehicles can cost $10,000 more even after rebates, or a heat pump system seems exorbitant.
The city of Denver may offer rebates for restaurant electrification from its publicly voted climate resilience sales tax, but so far the paperwork has been daunting, Peters said.
Getting rid of open flames can also lower the requirements for expensive vent hoods and fire control systems, Forlines said.
At Sexy Pizza, Peters said, one baker like Hilton can handle a two dozen pie order for a Montessori school fundraiser rather than the two a big order would have taken on a more temperamental gas oven. The PizzaMaster 983 in Uptown pumps out pie after pie from the same spot on the stone without losing temperature, where the gas ovens would bog down a bit with new dough and take a few minutes to come back to the right temperature, managers said.
When Hilton hit a button after the 19th pie, it was to adjust a zone that had just burned through a crust and left a sinkhole in one pie, which the employees would happily eat.
Precise electronic controls and near-instantaneous adjustments to temperature through electric systems can be a plus for big kitchens with complex food prep and warming needs, Forlines said. For smaller outlets, say a barista prepping sandwiches or soups alone at a coffee shop, all-electric can be like a chef’s assistant in a box on the counter. The electronic systems are also easily adjusted remotely, before or after hours, through Wi-Fi, he said.
In cramped kitchens, gas ovens and fryers give off far more waste heat, and trying to eliminate some of that is a courtesy to hardworking employees, restaurateurs said.
Finally, the electric PizzaMaster and its hood are about 8-feet long. A gas pizzeria with comparable output would have been nearly 16-feet long, Peters said, a nonstarter in the Uptown location that is more pizza stand than sit-down restaurant.
Third: Check the numbers. And the crust.
Just a few weeks into the latest oven experiment, Sexy Pizza may actually be spending more money on power at the Uptown stand than it does for gas ovens, Peters said. Natural gas is relatively cheap at the moment, away from any winter storm spikes, and electric costs have gone up.
Still, Peters said, they hope to even those numbers back out with more experience, and the tradeoffs still leave the electric PizzaMaster as a far better option overall.
Some foods (or their chefs) are more stubborn to change than others, the experts noted. Some Asian cooks are waiting for proof that an electric wok system has the same speed, flavor and flair as an open flame, for example. Gas deep fryers typically heat up faster initially than electric, but electric fryers recover faster when a new batch of fries are thrown in.
Every new area of commerce or sales that get electrified go through an education transition, Forlines noted. “There seems to be kind of a backward looking view,” he said. “Gas is traditional, and it’s what we like and what we see.”
The Denver restaurant community is quite collaborative on the new technology, Peters said. They tried out ovens like the PizzaMaster at a local test kitchen. Blue Pan Pizza, with a thick, buttery Detroit-style crust, went electric and was “super helpful” in getting Sexy Pizza into the process, he added.
The most important constituency, though, is the outcome for the pie itself. Sexy Pizza finds the electric process brings the crust out with “a little more air, slightly fluffier.”
“Everybody’s happy,” Peters said.