Why would they? It’s takes work with no return. It’s giving something of value (theoretically) for nothing in return, not even good relations for the restaurant since they are now gone.
I worked at a pizza place that shut down, and it never even occurred to anyone. For one thing the owner was obviously stressed out worrying about a bunch of other things, both in the restaurant and in her personal life, and you’d be surprised how much of the food you get at restaurants is really just purchased from a company like Cisco and warmed up for you. We did make the actual pizza from scratch though, and that place had the best crust of any pizza place I’ve ever been too. The problem there was that the recipe was very simple. Just flour, water, oil, salt, sugar, and yeast. That’s it. The trick is the exact ratio, and a proper pizza oven. The oven a recipe can’t help with, and for reasons I don’t understand scaling down recipes, especially in baking, does not produce the same result. A recipe that starts with a 50 pound bag of flour is useless to you, and if you just try to divide all the weights by 100 the end result just isn’t good. All you really know is that you can make good pizza dough with flour, water, oil, salt, sugar, and yeast. That is not exactly shocking news.
and a proper pizza oven. The oven a recipe can’t help with
Fortunately, it sounds like pizza steels do a really impressive job replicating a good oven.
Yes and no. You can get amazing pizza just as good as a proper pizza oven with a pizza steel or a pizza stone if you know what you’re doing and have a good oven, but again there are subtle differences that make it so you can’t just replace one for a large pizza oven with no other adjustments and still get the exact same results.
Tell me more about these pizza steels. I know of stone, but a quick google shows me that steels exist, but why steel over stone?
In short, they can hold a lot more heat than the stones, mimicking the effect of professional pizza ovens.
So the idea is to cook a pizza in the shortest possible time in order to thoroughly cook the dough and outer layers, whilst leaving the ingredients with a delightful freshness. With a conventional oven the process takes much longer, tending to cook everything evenly, producing a drier pizza in which you don’t get that ‘brick oven effect.’
I’ve tried the stones myself, heating them on max heat for a whole hour beforehand. They can help a bit, but it’s still not the same. All that’s my take on the situation, anyway.
I checked the FV just now and I don’t see a pizza community here that goes in to this stuff. Unfortunately for now, you’ll have to visit the evil empire for more precise info.
Maybe they’re preserving the option to try again with a new restaurant?
Because they’re busy going out of business, I’d imagine. It’s actually a pretty complicated process if you want to avoid a bunch of extra problems down the line. If publishing the recipes helped avoid some of those problems, they might do it. But they’re more likely trying to protect themselves from creditors and get their taxes sorted and final paychecks and selling inventory and equipment and real estate…
Because there is no incentive when the only general goal in life is profit.
