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posted by chromas on Wednesday August 01 2018, @05:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the pizza≠pie dept.

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)?


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  • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday August 02 2018, @01:29AM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Thursday August 02 2018, @01:29AM (#716011) Journal

    To each his own. If you create wonderful pizzas by your standards with your device, great. Keep doing what you're doing and enjoy your food the way you like it.

    But just as you claim a Chicago pizza is actually a "casserole", there are many different pizza styles in the world. Roman pizza is different from NY deli style, and Neapolitan is still different from both. Roman and Naples styles rely on a very fast bake and very high temperatures to achieve a certain texture. Steam building up in and around the crust (or not) can have a major effect, especially in very short high-temp bakes.

    I know my post above makes me sound like a real pizza nerd, but honestly I just started making them from scratch once per week or so for family and (like all nerds) looked to improve it over time. I don't hang out on the crazy online pizza forums where people obsess over so many little details. But that doesn't mean there are no differences in pizza styles. If you don't care about the differences between my pizzas and yours, fine. I don't judge, and you should enjoy what you like just like I do.

    But over the years as I've varied recipes and bought new equipment, I've done multiple taste tests (sometimes blind) with family members and guests, directly comparing results. The thing about heat transfer and length of bake discussed in this study does make a noticeable difference in product. Whether those changes are things you value and enough to you to justify the trouble over your own method is your choice of course.

    I'm skeptical of most "foodies" myself. Blind taste tests have shown that a lot of wine lore and expensive coffee lore is crap, for example. But baking techniques can produce vastly different products.

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