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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: 1) by gtomorrow on Thursday August 02 2018, @08:10AM (1 child)

    by gtomorrow (2230) on Thursday August 02 2018, @08:10AM (#716111)

    Champagne [wikipedia.org] (the bubbly stuff, not the city) is a sparkling wine that is made in the Champagne region of France with grapes grown in the same region. If it's not abiding by these two simple rules, it's not champagne. Call it something else, e.g., "sparkling wine". But don't call it champagne...because it isn't.

    Bourbon [wikipedia.org] is an American whiskey (not whisky) made from 51% corn aged in charred oak barrels (other rules apply, see link). You can't call it Scotch [wikipedia.org]; the geography of production and the processes, while similar, are different resulting in a different product, nuanced as the differences may be.

    The product sold and served in most North American (and elsewhere) restaurants is not pizza. For lack of a proper term, it is a fried-in-an-oven, open-faced cheese sandwich with an unlimited choice of toppings, some having absolutely no business being on a pizza. There is no butter and/or margarine in traditional pizza dough. In pizza Napoletana, there is no fat content whatsoever in the dough. The cheese product sold in North America is not Mozzarella, even where it is (legally) called such. Pizza Napoletana has a STG [wikipedia.org] classification. Where Italian regions have their own variations on the theme, they usually all have a variant name.

    If a product isn't following rules of production, call it something else. This isn't "a rose is a rose is a rose," this is being sold a dozen dandelions called roses. Americans are great at coining new terms and phrases that stick. Invent another name. No one in their right mind would ever call (for example) Little Caesars' product "pizza" even though they do. What's lacking is the proper term. How about..."Za"?

  • (Score: 2) by chromas on Friday August 03 2018, @02:16PM

    by chromas (34) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 03 2018, @02:16PM (#716701) Journal

    Open-face sandwiches aren't real sandwiches. unpopular-opinion-puffin.jpg