Beyond The Dough Presented By

Rest In Peace, Merrill!

I was in our Perfect Crust/Incredible Bags office when I was told that Merrill Hansen had passed away the day before.

Merrill was the designer of all of our bags. He was 84, and I would jokingly call him “Greatest Generation.”

This isn’t a plug for our bags but for Merrill. Everything he did was QUALITY. Our bags are QUALITY, and they will pay homage to him for years.

His generation built things to last. Period. It reflects in our bags.

He was a great father, husband and businessman.

I spoke with Merrill often, and it almost always turned into a chat about God, family, hockey and bags. He held all four in the highest reverence.

You will be missed, Bag Man!

To learn more about Perfect Crust’s pizza liners and other products, visit perfectcrust.com or email Eric Bam at Eric@perfectcrust.

About Eric Bam:

Eric is the VP of Sales & Marketing for Perfect Crust Pizza Liners and Incrediblebags.com. Eric is a goal driven optimist that uses his positive attitude to lift up those around him. He’s a father to Nycholas, Alayna and Ruby. He’s a public speaker and show host. You can find him on all social media @TheEricBam.

Detour at McDonald’s

As with any company, there have been bumps on the road to Donatos’ expansion. There was also a sudden, unexpected detour. When McDonald’s offered to buy the company in 1999, Grote and his family weren’t even looking to sell. “But there were a lot of pros,” Abell says. “They’re the largest restaurant company and know what they’re doing. They have done it already, and they have access to capital to grow quicker than we probably could have at the time. So we decided to sell.”

With that partnership, Grote’s dream of global growth came true, as the first Donatos opened in Germany. The company also expanded beyond the Midwest, into cities like Philadelphia and Atlanta. But it was also morphing into an entirely different sort of behemoth. “We had grown to nearly 200 restaurants, but we were building buildings faster than our people, which is a hard thing,” Abell says. “You have to keep developing your people as you develop your buildings….We started [turning] into something that we weren’t [supposed to be]. We had larger restaurants, 2,800 square feet, with dining rooms. All of a sudden, we had front-of-the-house, back-of-the-house, and much more of a casual-dining feel. That was a culture shift for us, because we are much more about pickup and delivery. We have some dining rooms and party rooms, but not full service. Our sales/ investment ratio was upside-down. And we were investing way more in the buildings—we were up to $1.5 million on a buildout, and that’s an upside-down model.”

Then, one day in 2003, Abell was driving to work when she heard a news report on NPR: McDonald’s was planning to either sell or close all of its Donatos locations. She and her dad seized the chance to buy the company back and rebuild it their way. “We were losing a lot of money, so we needed to restructure and get focused on basics again,” she says. “And that’s what we did. We had to leave a couple of markets, because we didn’t have the infrastructure to continue to support them, including Germany. But we retrenched and had a great turnaround. We rebounded. We had a $10.5 million turnaround that first year and then started growing again.”

A Hub of Hope

And that new growth came in innovative ways. Today, Donatos has 431 locations in 27 states, including 248 nested in Red Robin burger restaurants. That relationship started in 2018, meaning Donatos was a ghost brand before ghost brands became the “next big thing.”

“I didn’t know a lot about Red Robin until they approached us, but everything they talked about—their purpose and their values—aligned with us,” Abell says. “They talk about love, about the heart of the house. They take care of their people and the community. They truly are a great partner. [The Donatos locations] increased sales for them at their end—I think it was 8% the last time I heard. So the Red Robins with Donatos locations have seen a basis point improvement. It’s been a success for us and for them. I think growth through venues like that is the future, although we still are going to do traditional stores.”

Abell has other ideas for the future of business, too. Which brings us back to agape capitalism.

Abell took over her dad’s role as president of Donatos in 2007 and replaced him as chair of the board in 2010. In addition to spearheading all of that growth through Red Robin and adding more traditional stores to the lineup, Abell took on the new role of Donatos’ chief purpose officer with zeal. Columbus’ south side, where the first Donatos store opened 60 years ago, had fallen on hard times. Manufacturing businesses had abandoned the area, taking good-paying jobs with them. The mayor asked Abell and Grote for help.

“One in four houses were boarded up, and 70% of the population lived at 200% below the poverty rate,” Abell says. “Kids between the ages of 16 and 26 were not in school, not working, didn’t have their GED. There was high drug trafficking, high human trafficking, high gang activity, and a lot of violence in that neighborhood.”

Leveraging the Grote family’s reputation and connections with local officials, business leaders and nonprofits, Abell and her friend, Tanny Crane, helped found the Reeb Center in a former elementary school building and set about revitalizing the area. The facility houses 10 nonprofits that offer everything from adult education and workforce development programs to early childhood care, mental and behavioral healthcare, GED and hospitality courses, and statewide certification for nursing.

The latter, Abell says, is a six-week course for nursing assistants. “And then, literally down the street, they can get a job at Nationwide Children’s Hospital.” The Reeb Center’s partners have also trained locals for jobs at Grant Medical Center in Columbus. “There are three different jobs in the hospital system that have high turnover, so we focused on those and helped train people to be employed at Grant, which has been great.”

Abell has seen firsthand the difference the Reeb Center— which she calls a “hub of hope”—has made in the community. “We offer an education for infants and toddlers all the way up through high school with the Boys & Girls Club and even as adults. Moms, dads, aunts, uncles and grandparents can come in and get access to services to help them find a job while their kids are either in the Learning Center or the Boys & Girls Club….We have a café there, too. They’re walking around, they’re talking, they’re engaging with people, and you can truly see the transformation in people just being there and getting the programming that they need.”

In March 2022, Abell, Grote and their family launched the Donatos Family Foundation to focus on three pillars—housing, hunger and health—in the communities that Donatos serves. The foundation devotes a specific time period to raising funds for each pillar every year, starting this year with Habitat for Humanity. Donatos itself also hires the formerly incarcerated, giving them a chance to rebuild their lives.

For Abell and her family—most of whom have leadership roles at Donatos—doing business through the power of love is the only way to do business. It always has been. But they’re also riding a surging wave of consumer interest in companies that do real good in the world, whether through traditional business models or social entrepreneurship.

“I think we’ve all seen that…in these last couple of years, with the pandemic and so much social upheaval,” Abell says. “And it’s not just the next generation that’s looking for authentic companies, but it’s the overall consumer. They want to do business with people that they can trust and that have an authentic story. And I think people can see through [contrived] authenticity, when companies sometimes create a story because it’s important to have that story, versus it’s just authentically us at Donatos. It’s authentically who we have been for the last 60 years in doing business.”

BY TOM LEHMANN

Editor’s note: The late Tom “The Dough Doctor” Lehmann was the dough making sage of the pizza industry and happily shared his wisdom with PMQ’s readers for more than 20 years. We believe Tom would still write for us in pizza heaven if he could, so we’re reprinting this (slightly edited) article he penned in 2008. It’s both timeless and, in light of current inflationary prices, as timely as ever.

I’msure that most of you are wondering if the price of flour will ever come back down again. For many, it can’t come down fast enough. With the high costs of cheese, meats and other ingredients, our bottom lines aren’t just hurting; they’re in serious trouble. Some pizzeria operators might be looking to sidestep flour costs by using some other type of flour. Sadly, you can’t blend other types of flour into your wheat flour to come up with a lower-cost alternative. But you can blend different types of flours into your wheat flour to make some truly unique pizza crusts with different flavor and textural properties and charge more for them.

Considering the Alternatives

First, you need to have a full understanding of the flour that you presently use. Wheat flour consists of several different groups of proteins, two of which—glutenin and gliadin— are essential to pizza making. When hydrated with water and mixed, they produce the structure-forming material that we call gluten in our dough. Gluten holds dough together, allowing it to be sheeted, pressed, stretched and tossed without coming apart. It also contributes to the bite, or chewiness, of the baked pizza.

Other grains contain these specific gluten-forming proteins but in such a low quantity that forming and shaping dough becomes problematic. These include rye, barley and triticale, a wheat-rye cross. While rye flour can be used to make pizza, rye dough is sticky and weak, making it difficult to handle or shape.

Semolina flour has gluten-forming proteins, too, but the type of gluten derived from durum flour is extremely tight, not very elastic or stretchable. That makes for dough that’s difficult to shape well and has a lot of memory. Also, after baking, this flour can impart extreme toughness to the finished crust.

Barley flour contains gluten-forming proteins, but, again, the level of glutenforming protein is so low that the doughs are weak and sticky, plus they’re more expensive than wheat flours.

Some other nonwheat flours include buckwheat, corn flour, rice flour, quinoa and amaranth. Others that can be incorporated into the dough formulation—providing uniquely flavored crusts or crusts with a “healthy” or exotic-sounding appeal—include flaxseed meal, soy flour, sorghum flour, oat flour and spelt flour.

Doing the Math

When making a blended flour crust, you can add any of the above-mentioned nonwheat flours at replacement levels of up to 25% of the total wheat flour. So if you use 50 pounds of wheat flour, you can replace up to 12.5 pounds of it with one or more of these other flour types to produce a uniquely flavored crust.

Something to keep in mind when working with nonwheat blends: They will exhibit an affinity for water in much the same way the wheat flour does; in many cases, it may actually be greater than that of flour. To determine how much water needs to be added to the dough, place a known quantity, such as 10 ounces, of the nonwheat flour material into a small bowl, then add 5 ounces of water and stir until the water is mixed into the material. If the resulting paste is too thick and/or too dry, stir in another ounce of water. Continue doing this until the material looks to be well-hydrated and allow the mix to hydrate for 60 minutes. Then check it again for consistency and add more water if necessary. If you add more water, remember to allow the material to hydrate again for another hour before checking it for correct hydration.

When the material has the consistency of very thick oatmeal, it’s properly hydrated. You can calculate the absorption percent by dividing the weight of water added by the weight of the nonwheat flour used, then multiplying by 100. For example, if you started with 10 ounces of nonwheat material and ended up adding 7 ounces of water before it was fully hydrated, you would divide 7 by 10 and multiply by 100—in this case, 70% absorption.

To use this in calculating your dough absorption, multiply the white flour weight by 0.56 to find the correct absorption for that portion of the flour blend, and then multiply the nonwheat flour weight by 0.70 to find the correct absorption for that portion of the flour blend. Add up the two weights and you’ll have the correct amount of water to add to the dough with that flour blend.

Do Some Experimenting

When using nonwheat flours, you’ll want to experiment a little on smaller dough batches to determine what changes are needed to complement the nonwheat flour. An increase in sweetness might help. In this case, the type of sweetener used, such as honey, white sugar, brown sugar, molasses or malt syrup, could be an important consideration, as it can influence the flavor of the crust, the perceived sweetness, or the perception of “healthful” or “natural” to the consumer.

The use of butter, margarine or butter-flavored oil (instead of olive oil) can also have a significant impact on crust flavor, especially when flaxseed meal, oat flour, barley flour or soy flour is used.

With a wheat and nonwheat blend, the dough will be somewhat weaker than a normal white-flour dough, probably requiring less mixing time. Be sure to mix the dough just until a smooth dough appearance is achieved, and then take the dough directly to the bench for scaling and balling.

To use the dough on the same day, put it into plastic dough boxes and lightly oil the tops of the dough balls, then stack and nest the boxes and let them set at room temperature for 90 minutes before forming the dough balls into pizza skins.

If you refrigerate and store the dough overnight, crossstack the dough boxes in the cooler for 90 minutes, and then down-stack and nest the boxes to prevent drying. Allow the dough to remain in the cooler for 18 to 24 hours. To use the dough, remove a quantity sufficient for a three-hour period and place at room temperature to temper for two hours. Then begin shaping into dough skins. The dough will remain good to use over the next three hours. Any unused dough may be opened into skins, placed onto screens and held in the cooler for several hours until needed for making pizzas. Due to the weakness of these doughs, they should not be held in the cooler for more than one day.

When making a pizza with any of these crusts, you may also need to experiment with the baking time. Since these crusts will be more dense than your regular white-flour crusts, they should be allowed to bake for a slightly longer time, ideally at a lower temperature (450° to 500°F), assuming you’re using a deck oven. But, in most cases, for practical purposes, you’ll want to keep the oven settings the same as you use for your regular pizza production. In that case, consider baking these special pizzas on a screen or a baking disk in your deck oven, which will allow for a longer baking time without burning the pizza. Then “deck” the pizza for the last 45 to 60 seconds of baking. (“Decking” involves removing the pizza from the screen or disk and placing it directly on the oven hearth to further crisp it.)

None of these approaches will reduce your flour costs, but they may help you to develop some new or different offerings that will command a better price, thus boosting your bottom line. Additionally, the right combination might appeal to a different group of customers that you didn’t previously attract, thus expanding your customer base. In these trying times, we need all the help we can get with those bottom-line numbers.