Nobody can ever seem to
agree on which pizza is the best, so a team of scientists decided to call in an
unbiased pizza-evaluation algorithm to determine how to compose a winning pie.
While a fair assessment
of pizza quality — a pressing concern in certain food circles — would require
considering everything from crust char to sauce flavor, the scientists kicked
off what will hopefully be an ongoing project by zeroing in one highly important
aspect of any pie: the cheese. (This was actually a collaboration with
Fonterra, a multinational dairy cooperative with a clear interest in the
study's results.)How can a pizzaiolo
select a cheese that will brown and blister perfectly? Is mozzarella really
best? Teasing out the science of pizza cheese is no small matter."Pizza browning and
blistering seems like a totally trivial question," study coauthor Bryony James, PhD, a materials engineer at the University of
Auckland, admits in a video about the study. "You stuff your pizza in the
oven, and it's clearly going to brown and blister."But there's a lot of
complexity underlying what seems like a relatively simple process. The cheese
itself is a complex material, and the way it ends up looking and tasting is, in
part, a reaction to every other ingredient in the pizza and the way each of
them transforms under high heat.The fact that two pizzas
rarely come out looking the same may be celebrated by pizza purists, but it
presents a difficult problem for pizza manufacturers, who may want to provide a
consistent experience or offer custom options for picky eaters. "Consumers
like pizza to look a certain way," says James, who goes on to describe
what is probably her ideal pie. "It should have discrete patches of that
toasty cheese color," she says, "and a uniform golden brown background."
The
Experiment
In order to do a
thorough investigation of the properties required to best achieve such results,
the scientists included a wide range of cheeses — not just mozzarella, which is
clearly
the gold standard, but also cheddar, Colby, Edam, Emmental, Gruyere, and provolone.
They sprinkled each cheese on top of a pizza base in exacting amounts, and decided against using sauce so they wouldn't have to worry about an additional variable. Then each pie was baked for the same amount of time.
Some researchers may have opted to call in a panel of tasters to evaluate each pie. But humans can be fickle — not to mention expensive. So the team opted to do a machine-vision analysis of the pies instead, relying on a machine that took careful pictures and then made sense of them, using specially developed algorithms that could quantify the color and uniformity of each pizza.
The team also assessed each cheese for meltability and elasticity as well as oil and water activity.
What They Found
Turns out mozzarella is king of the pizza cheeses for a reason: "its unique stretchability," the authors, led by Xixiu Ma, conclude. It also produces high levels of bubble-making steam and low levels of free-flowing oil, which is why those bubbles brown up so nicely. But for those willing to mix it up a bit, the study revealed some interesting things.
Adding oily cheeses like Gruyere or provolone will make the pizza less burnt-looking, while sprinkling on some Colby cheese will facilitate a more uniform appearance.
Here are the photos of each cheese pizza, as well as the machine-vision analysis of its uniformity and color — mozzarella clearly produces the most varied, exciting-looking pie:
The image below shows how the different cheeses browned very differently (and that's not mold — the browned areas are outlined in green):
At the end of all this —
which served as an example of the capabilities of machine-vision, not just an
analysis of cheese — the authors offered this conclusion: "Different
cheeses can be employed on 'gourmet' style pizzas in combination with
Mozzarella."You heard the scientists, pizzaiolos of
the world: Go wild.But for best results, don't forget to
include a generous sprinkling of mozzarella.The paper, "Quantification of Pizza
Baking Properties of Different Cheeses, and Their Correlation with Cheese
Functionality," was published in the August 2014 issue of The Journal of
Food Science
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