House-Made Pizza Dough Makes the Difference

When pizza is one of the most recognizable foods served in contract dining programs, it is important to prepare an inviting pie that tastes fresh and offers the comforting combination of a flavorful crust and thoughtfully selected toppings. In busy dining environments, however, premade or frozen pizza crusts are often used to simplify production and promote consistency. While convenient, these products can hinder the guest’s overall experience while limiting the chef’s control over texture, flavor, freshness, and customization. At Parkhurst, our Culinary Gold Standards drive our chefs to elevate the pizza experience for our guests, starting with a foundation of fresh, house-made pizza dough.

Pizza Guided By Culinary Gold Standards

Everyday, our chefs are guided by our Culinary Gold Standards, a set of practices that define how our kitchens operate. Not only does this ensure consistency, care, and quality across every kitchen, but it also prioritizes scratch cooking, real ingredients, and chef led decision making. These standards are not just reserved for special occasions or complex dishes. They also shape how our chefs prepare everyday favorites, including pizza.

We start by hand-crafting every pizza with fresh, house-made pizza dough, and then build upon this fresh foundation by preparing different pizza styles, creating new flavor combinations, using seasonal ingredients, and providing location-specific offerings. These recipes are then shared in a database across all our sites, helping to keep the level of customization scalable. This enables us to know and understand the personal needs of our individual sites while delivering the experience and excellence of a large-scale company.

When a familiar menu item like pizza is made from scratch, it reflects intentionality, freshness, and culinary skill. It also brings visible craftsmanship into the dining experience, reinforcing the quality and care behind a menu item that guests already know and enjoy.

Furthermore, with programs like Kitchen Coaching, our chefs provide culinary demonstrations and hands-on classes for our student guests, allowing them to learn the skill of mixing, preparing, and working with their own dough from scratch. Such opportunities illustrate a natural extension of our Culinary Gold Standards.

Pizzas Across Parkhurst

Every pizza across the Parkhurst footprint starts with hand-made dough. Check out these photos from a few of our sites including Kalamazoo, Juniata, Franklin, Heidelberg, Lafayette, and Marietta.

Students proudly showcase made-from-scratch pizzas created during Franklin College's first Kitchen Coaching session, celebrating a successful day of hands-on culinary learning.

Kitchen Coaching participants at Franklin College gain hands-on experience from kneading dough and building pizzas to the final bake, creating their own made-from-scratch creations along the way.

Fresh pizzas bake to perfection in the oven at Juniata College.

Students enjoyed every step of the pizza-making process during Kitchen Coaching at Juniata College, turning culinary learning into a memorable campus experience filled with creativity, teamwork, and great food.

Students practice dough-stretching and pizza-making techniques during Kitchen Coaching at Marietta College, developing culinary skills through a hands-on learning experience.

During a chef-led Kitchen Coaching session at Lafayette College, students learned the art and science of making pizza from scratch, gaining hands-on culinary experience while building confidence in the kitchen.

Kitchen Coaching at Kalamazoo College brought students together to learn the art of pizza making, building confidence in the kitchen through hands-on instruction, creativity, and even a few heart-shaped pizzas.

As part of Heidelberg University's Kitchen Coaching program, participants explored the history of pizza, practiced dough-shaping techniques, and created personalized pizzas from scratch while building culinary skills and confidence.

The Delicious Results

Beginning with house-made dough gives our chefs greater control over the character of the crust while creating more opportunities to thoughtfully pair sauces, cheeses, toppings, and seasonal ingredients. When such creativity is combined with our Culinary Gold Standards, it enables our teams to maintain quality and consistency within the contract dining environment, thus, eliminating the need to use frozen crusts and other premade options that can limit freshness, flavor, texture, customization, and, most importantly, care.

Discover more of the culinary practices that guide our chefs and shape our guests’ experience.