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Ever wonder why a pizza made in your home oven doesn't taste as good as one made in a brick oven? You're not the only one. Some researchers think they've figured it out:
The fact that you need a vaulted brick oven to bake a great Italian-style pizza is well-known, but Glatz and Andrey Varlamov, also a pizza-eater and physicist at the Institute of Superconductors, Oxides and Other Innovative Materials and Devices in Rome, wanted to know why. The secret behind a pizzeria's magic, they concluded in a paper published on arXiv.org last month, is in some unique thermal properties of the brick oven.
They started off interviewing pizzaiolos, or pizza makers, in Rome who were masters of the Roman style of pizza. For this, the bake lasts 2 minutes at 626 degrees Fahrenheit. (Neapolitan pizzas usually bake at an even higher temperature — at least 700 degrees.) That turns out a "well-baked but still moist dough and well-cooked toppings," Glatz says. The same settings in a conventional steel oven produce far less ideal results. "You burn the dough before the surface of the pizza even reaches boiling, so this is not a product you will want to eat," he says.
The story goes on to note that the temperature conductivity of a metal oven is much greater than a brick oven, leading to burning of the crust. Adjusting with a lower temperature fails as it then leaves a dried-out crust and toppings. Accommodations with a pizza stone, oil, and a broiler can help, but cannot entirely mitigate the difference.
If you're hungry, and in a hurry, it looks like the brick-oven pizzas can be prepared much more quickly, too.
When I was in college the original Battlestar Galactica television series came out. We would gather in an upperclassman's dorm room and watch the show on a 13-inch TV. This was followed immediately by a trip to the local Rathskeller and an order for what we called a "death star" pizza... "double loaded extra everything, no guppies" (i.e. anchovies). That and a couple of pitchers of beer was a fine way to wrap up a Sunday.
What are your favorite toppings? Alternatively, are there any toppings you think should never be put on a pizza (such as pineapple)?
(Score: 2) by Rich on Wednesday August 01 2018, @07:35AM (2 children)
The paper uses metric units: 300-330 °C for Rome, 400-450 °C for Naples.
Also, what the paper does not consider is the influence of water diffusion into porous oven material. I've always thought this is a major factor in the crispiness of the bottom of stone oven pizza. I might be wrong and at the optimum temperature curve, all the bottom water exits through the toppings, but I'd like to see them investigate that. Just looking at the thermal energy flow with a few pretty pictures is a bit cheap when aiming for an ignobel...
(Score: 4, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday August 01 2018, @12:41PM
I don't have scientific data to back it up, but I think this is much less important than traditionally assumed.
I heard this too and believed it for many years. I own a very premium extra-large thick baking stone I've baked bread and pizza on for about 15 years. Yes it works great, and supposedly the porous element is important. (I also use a rather wet dough recipe that has a lot of moisture.)
Then I read this [seriouseats.com] article about 6 years ago (not a scientific test but by a food science guy). I bought a large hunk of steel myself, and it indeed kicked up my pizza quality by several notches. The baking steel is the only way I've achieved anything vaguely resembling Neapolitan style pizza in a home oven. You simply can't get heat transfer fast enough to simulate a 700+ F oven in a standard home oven (without breaking your warranty and voiding your home insurance by misusing your oven cleaning cycle), so a giant hunk of steel gives you heat transfer fast enough to cook a decent pizza. Still not true Neapolitan, but a hell of a lot better than I ever achieved with a baking stone or clay tiles or even bricks in my home oven. (Yeah, I tried a lot.)
So, I have some doubts about the conclusions of this study. Yes, brick ovens do have a unique profile (and I hope to build a wood-fired one in my back yard in a few years), but metal has its uses too and sometimes the heat transfer is an advantage.
Oh and to reply to the summary:
The problem with home ovens here is often heat capacity and recovery time. Still, with a pizza steel, cooking a pizza takes barely five minutes. Combined with the broiler, you can cut it even further. With a double oven at home, I've baked 8 pizzas in less than 40 minutes for a party once, and that included some time for temp recovery between bakes. (Honestly, I was mostly slowed down by stretching and topping -- there's only so fast you can go even with good prep.)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by darkfeline on Wednesday August 01 2018, @07:43PM
Pedant: degrees Celsius is not a unit (in the sense that one unit corresponds to a well defined amount of something, and two units correspond to twice that amount). You cannot have millidegrees Celsius or megadegrees Celsius.
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