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The physics of baking good pizza

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Re: The physics of baking good pizza

#151

Post by beachy »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #79
toomanybeersies wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've actually had some really good frozen pizzas. The best ones I ever had were actually $4 frozen pizzas from the supermarket that were made in Italy. I'm not sure how they made a pizza in Italy and shipped it to NZ and managed to sell it for $4, but they were great, or at least the quattro fromaggio ones were. The ones with any frozen vegetables like mushrooms were sort of crap, the mushrooms went all watery. In my…

I really, really love Red Baron frozen pizza. I dunno, I think it's the crust maybe? It's crisp but not cracker-like, a bit buttery, almost pastry-ish. (Geez, I sound like a shill. After 5 years and 8000+ HN karma, Red Baron's sockpuppet account finally pays off!)

Playing the long game! Very good.

Re: The physics of baking good pizza

#152

Post by KozmoNau7 »

jules wrote: post #147
KozmoNau7 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"You can't bake good napolitan pizza" Yes you can. Good dough, high thermal mass (baking steel) and thorough preheating are the most important points. "Oh, but it doesn't get to 350/400/a quadrillion degrees like a real pizza oven does!" the peanut gallery cries. A lot of great pizzarias don't bake their pizzas above ~300 anyway. Just turn your oven way up and let it preheat properly. It is not properly heated when…

The problem with low heat is that the pizza doesn't rise properly and the pizza needs to stay in the over for longer which makes the crust dry out. If you have a good oven and a pizza stone then you might be able to do it, but most people don't have that. My oven maxes out at 200 even though it claims to do 230.

~240 here, and I've got a very high thermal mass baking steel.

Re: The physics of baking good pizza

#153

Post by culturestate »

pathsjs wrote: post #130
culturestate wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an American who lives abroad...I hear this about American bread all the time but I've yet to discover what's actually different. Supermarket sandwich bread is just about the same everywhere. Perhaps the rest of the world is just used to buying from a bakery, rather than the supermarket?

Well, it's the other way round. In Italy supermarkets evolved to contain bakeries, because otherwise people would not buy supermarket bread. Nowadays you can find pretty good bread at the supermarket, but it is all fresh

I should probably clarify: by "supermarket bread" I mean the pre-wrapped, pre-sliced stuff you buy from the carb aisle, like Wonderbread. Most American supermarkets (well, most suburban ones at any rate) also have traditional bakeries inside.

Re: The physics of baking good pizza

#154

Post by Jedd »

sgc wrote: post #135
Jedd wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 90s maximum thing was told to me by the bread chef at River Cottage (woo!) ... I did subsequently check, and it seems to be legit in terms of being able to be called a Neapolitan style pizza [1] -- you need to have it cooked in under 90s. There's some other quite specific requirements, around thinness of dough, and flour type. I gather the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana is a bit like the Comité Champagne -…

I can tell you straight up that in the real world that is not what happens most of the time. It's also not always Oak, many places use Beech or similar woods. It's virtually impossible to run an oven with 20 pizzas in it at that pace, and I have worked with some incredible Pizzaioli. I am also far from convinced that keeping it under 2 minutes makes the best pizza, and there were many times where we considered the ov…

Yup, I'm sure there's a bit of licence exercised with some of those requirements.

For example, making quite a small pizza would make it easier to get sufficient heat / rise in under 90s -- this is what we were doing on our bread-making course. The wood oven had been heating up all morning, I think reaching more than 500, but we were cooking with the fire completely removed, and the thermal mass holding the temperature around 350 ish from memory. More than sufficient.

Re: The physics of baking good pizza

#155

Post by kwhitefoot »

toomanybeersies wrote: post #54
emmelaich wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Portable bench-top pizza "ovens" do amazingly well. They have a heated stone base and large electrical elements in the lid. You have to be careful not to cook it too fast -- you turn it right down between pizzas. Downside is they only do one at a time but that's usually fine. [edit - the one we have is very similar to this: New Wave NWKA 1200W Stone Bake Just Pizza Maker (Red) ]

My parents have one of those, they use it maybe twice a year. It does make good pizza though. They're a like a bread maker in that regard. They seem super useful, but just never get used.

> They're a like a bread maker in that regard. They seem super useful, but just never get used.

I use my bread maker almost every day, sometimes twice. I dismantled the table top pizza oven because it was useless and now I just use the stone from it in the oven.

I suspect I am an outlier in the bread maker statistics :-)

Re: The physics of baking good pizza

#156

Post by swaggyBoatswain »

Pizza is interesting. Last year I spoke with the head of r&d of a major water filtering company based in italy, the birthplace of pizza.

A luttle unknown fact is Water quality makes a difference on the taste of pizza. There is a saying in the states that you cant replicate true new york pizza unless you use new york water, etc.

Good pizza water tastes awful if you drank it as is. I dont recall which elements were added inside of it, but its there. Another interesting tidbit is pizza quality is sometimes compared to coffee quality for water enthusiasts.

Sometimes called "waves". A first wave coffee shop is like getting a awful espresso shot at a hotel. 2nd and 3rd wave is like starbucks. 4th wave is when a coffee shop sources their own products and knows the history behind its goods. 5th wave is everything - these are generallly operated by famous baristas who have basic chemistry knowledge and expertise operating a espresso machine.

Pizza is the similar in ratings to coffee in this regards.

Re: The physics of baking good pizza

#157

Post by sgc »

makmanalp wrote: post #149
sgc wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgot to mention: It is a perpetual starter--take a pizza worth of dough to start the next batch (for maybe 100 pizzas).

To add, I think perhaps the levain makes it develop to a good state faster such that 2 days is fine as opposed to the 3+ I seem to need with no levain, if you want the nice spotted and bubbly dark and light pattern as opposed to the even golden brown.

For sure a live starter makes things move extremely fast. We would usually leave it at room temp for a shift and then refrigerate. I have seen people talking about 5+ days here. That would leave a spoiled batch using this faster method. 4 days tops usually.

Re: The physics of baking good pizza

#158

Post by keypress »

majewsky wrote: post #116
keypress wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cook from fresh every day. Now granted I'm not the fastest cook - but it can take anything from about 20mins to an 1h 30mins to prepare dinner. While I'm cooking I'm cleaning and doing other tasks. Left overs carry over to lunch or another evening meal. If I were to use a frozen meal, I'd have to defrost, and then cook, and likely would want something alongside it - like veg or salad. Unless Chef Mike (Microwave) i…

> I find it hard to see this being that much quicker. A part that's much quicker is that you just grab a frozen meal from the store, rather than first figuring out what to cook and then searching for ingredients at various sections of the store.

I just work with what I have, meal planning is too hard for me.

Re: The physics of baking good pizza

#159

Post by tiatia123 »

ponzored wrote: post #64
gry wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Related: I highly recommend the Cooking Issues podcast with Dave Arnold [ http://heritageradionetwork.org/series/cooking-issues/ ].

And this great book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Food_and_Cooking The science and history of food! Great illustrations too.

Hey mate. Sorry that your comment got flagged. YC is so terrible politically correct.

But be careful mate. In this age you can run into trouble for being heterosexual already: http://www.rooshv.com/i-was-detained-by-icelandic-police-aft...

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