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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 shortscreen on Wednesday August 01 2018, @07:44AM (1 child)
Their paper covers pizza history and explains what heat is. They conclude that a metal oven cooks the bottom too quickly and/or cooks the top too slowly. But they forgot to include the graphs and videos showing temperature over time with different sizes and densities of pizzas loaded into different ovens at different positions with and without insulators over or beneath.
As for me, I take the box out of the freezer, unwrap the slab, put it on the center rack, turn the dial to 420 and wait 20 minutes.
(Score: 2) by pkrasimirov on Wednesday August 01 2018, @08:01AM
And white is #FFFFFF, nothing difficult here :)