The Food Lab: Why Does Pepperoni Curl? | Hacker News Reader

The Food Lab: Why Does Pepperoni Curl?

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263 pointspepys64 comments

If you have any beyond-superficial interest in food, Serious Eats columns by Lopez-Alt are a guaranteed treat.

A personal favorite is the article on getting perfect french fries in McDonalds style, including managing to get a bag of still-frozen fries for in-depth analysis. A true food hack.

http://aht.seriouseats.com/archives/2010/05/the-burger-lab-h...

Kenji's (cook)book, The Food Lab, is also great, though it doesn't include everything he has on the blog.

It's also inexpensive enough to make a great random gift for foodie friends, despite being a hefty hardcover:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0393081087

If you like his stuff, you might also enjoy the Cooking Issues podcast, particularly the earlier episodes.

It's a bantercast mixed with food science, cooking call-ins, and random interviews with culinary cognoscenti. The host is the energetic and interesting Dave Arnold, who recently won a James Beard award for his book on cocktails, and who used to teach food technology at the French Culinary Institute in NYC (now the ICC). It's my favorite podcast of the year.

http://heritageradionetwork.org/series/cooking-issues/

This is unbelievable. The last months I've been enjoying his crazy good lasagne and ragu recipes. Like the best I've ever had, made by me. Yesterday I bought this book and now it's in hn...

If you love food and try to be a better cook, here's some good material. Too bad some ingredients, like chilies are a bit tough to find in Germany...

Chilies are pretty simple to grow yourself, even just by using the seeds from a dried one. A happy plant produces lots of chilies and the freeze fine for most uses. They don't like the cold, though, so depending which part of Germany you're in you might need to keep it indoors (but still with access to a few hours of sun a day).

Planning to do that chili con carne next Sunday, so no time to grow the plants... Also electricity is super expensive in Berlin, so any artificial growing lights will break my monthly budget.

I'd love to visit (or work in) Berlin. Can you find whole dried chili peppers, or canned? They're obviously not as good as fresh, but they'll still be delicious.

Dried chiles are very lightweight, so probably not very expensive to have shipped to you in bulk. They're easy to rehydrate (and you can use hot stock instead of water for extra flavor):

http://www.chilipeppermadness.com/cooking-with-chili-peppers...

Germans don't like spicy food in general. There are a handful of restaurants serving something that actually burns in your mouth, but you have to beg them to actually cook it for you. For chiles in supermarket, you get the basic jalapenos and if you're really lucky, habaneros with a premium price.

I did a huge batch of Kenji's chili con carne yesterday, probably my fourth time. You won't regret it.

Edit: this place looks promising in Berlin: https://potandpepper.de

According to Google, there's a place called Pfefferhaus in Berlin, all things hot.

http://pfefferhaus.de/de/Pfefferhaus-Berlin.html

Don't you have Turkish supermarkets? They should stock chilli.

If not, mail me, maybe I can help a fellow nerd (ie mail a bag of dried bird's-eye).

Peppers aren't that hard to find in Germany. You appear to also live in Berlin. As a Texan and significant cooking hobbyist (I ordered Kengi's book from the US before it was available in Germany), here are some tips:

Major grocery stores:

- Real usually has fresh cayenne peppers, bell peppers, and some long sweet peppers. Occasionally they also have habaneros.

- Edeka more often has habaneros, and often tabasco peppers too, but less often cayenne peppers. Usually also a couple kinds of non-spicy peppers.

- Organic stores usually have peppers too; I have an LPG-Biomarkt around the corner that virtually always has a couple kinds of peppers.

Markets:

- The Turkish market on Maybachufer usually has some peppers available. What is a bit of a mixed bag. As suggested, other Turkish markets and shops are likely to have similar.

Online:

You can get dried chilis here:

https://chilliesontheweb.co.uk/chilli/

They're shipped from the UK, so no (at least for a couple years) customs to deal with.

Don't get too hung up on the specific cultivar of chili. Most chilis are actually cultivars the same species and exist on a couple of spectrums of flavor and heat. Substituting fresh green cayenne peppers for jalapeños isn't going to radically change a recipe.

Thanks for the chilies on the web tip. They have a bit pricey postage, to Berlin almost 10 euros... But let's try them, because they have all the chiles needed for the chile paste. These Berlin shops mostly have the basic chiles. Once there was a chili hamburger place in Neukölln selling home grown chiles with different variety and they went bankrupt in a year. It seems germans don't like spicy food that much.

I don't know whether the postage from these UK guys will be any better - I'm just mentioning them as they are relatively close to me and I have been in their shop a few times:

http://chillipepperpete.com/

Cooking Issues has been my favorite podcast for several years. tptacek also enjoys it.

Kenji has a bunch of practical advice and he's a great writer (even though at times his own bias steps in prominently at time), but Dave Arnold is really a step above.

We all lament the loss of Jacky Molecules. :'(

Agreed on Kenji. Searching for Kenji + name of dish you need a recipe for is the pro-est of pro-tips.

I would throw Pioneer Woman on as the second Google option. She doesn't have the geeky bent that Kenji does, but has amazing recipes.

Except that eating Pioneer Woman recipes on a regular basis will take years off of your life. You will have have delicious years but fewer of them.

yeah but thats wrong, in-n-out makes the best fries. :p

Definitely! My own favorites are the tonkotsu ramen broth and chocolate chip cookies. (And yes, there are massive, in-depth posts about making the noodles and the cha siu pork belly to accompany the ramen too).

http://www.seriouseats.com/2012/02/how-to-make-tonkotsu-rame...

http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2013/12/the-food-lab-best...

That was an old one but really fun to do. The french fry recipe is a little out of hand in terms of the time and effort it takes to make them. Works better if you batch them and keep them in the freezer.

Kenji is not only an excellent writer, but his recipes are terrific too (eating his pressure cooker mushroom risotto as I'm typing this).

I've tried many recipes from that site and they have all been spectacular. The best part is how in-depth they go into why the recipes work.

Agreed. On great example is the (no doubt delicious) exploration that led to his chocolate chip cookie recipe.

(Explanation:) http://sweets.seriouseats.com/2013/12/the-food-lab-the-best-...

(Recipe:) http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2013/12/the-food-lab-best...

I can vouch for the fact that these are, indeed, excellent.

It's worth reading the article for the third paragraph alone :

There are times when I'll head into a bog-standard New York slice joint, see those pre-cooked squares with their flat disks of pepperoni, watch some poor sap order them, and think to myself: Ah, you've fallen victim to one of the two classic blunders, the most famous of which is "never question your pizza toppings in Asia," but only slightly less well known is this: "Never order a Sicilian when you spy flat-laying pepperoni on the line."

Why thanks!

This needs a [NSWH], aka Not Safe When Hungry.

In all sicilianness, the author just wanted an excuse to binge on home-baked pizza. Ugh. Disgusting. I'd do the same.

Next article in the series: "Why does bacon make everything taste better?"

> In all sicilianness, the author just wanted an excuse to binge on home-baked pizza.

Fact.

Kenji's obsessive and hilarious seriouseats.com research into the world's best burger and the world's best steaks and the world's best whatevers are priceless.

What surprised me is how this site kinda came out of nowhere and took the crown from the more staid web presences of well-established "serious eats" publications like Cook's Illustrated, etc.

Well... I did used to work for Cook's Illustrated so it's not a huge stretch to say it's a major influence!

Good point! Nice to see you here.

I think it has something to do with the Curl Theorem: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/CurlTheorem.html

It's the relationship between the line integral around the sausage (what the S stands for in δS) and the surface integral.

For n <= 3 dimensions, you may have the beginnings of a great SoCG (pronounced "sausage") paper.

Generalizing to n >= 5 dimensions would expand on the well-known Sausage Conjecture.

[1] http://socg2016.cs.tufts.edu/

[2] http://mathworld.wolfram.com/SausageConjecture.html

His articles and book don't suit my tastes, they're a bit too wordy for me and his "science" is more from experiments, less on the chemistry (proteins, salts, molecules etc).

For a more layman's chemistry view on food science, take a look at Harold McGee's book called "On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen". It really gave me a good foundation to actually understand what is going on when I cook. When my cooking is a disaster, I don't need to experiment as much because now I can think through what went wrong.

> His articles and book don't suit my tastes, they're a bit too wordy for me and his "science" is more from experiments, less on the chemistry (proteins, salts, molecules etc).

Not sure I understand the scare quotes. Experimentation and hypothesis testing are the bedrocks of science. Okay, he didn't use chemstry theories to create his hypothesis, but that's not a crime. In particular, the fact that he figured out that the curling was caused by the density of the sausage is very interesting and wouldn't have been possible to figure out if you just used chemistry.

The scare quotes were unintentional. Poor punctuation. Just defining his science as experimental.

Haha! My friend is in the Chicago Tribune today for his new pizzeria in Chicago and he managed to sneak in a reference to the grease chalice: http://www.chicagotribune.com/dining/restaurants/ct-paulie-g...

That image of the square cut deep dish is so very NSWH. Heck, I'm fully sated at the moment and I want that in my mouth right now. I may have to plan a trip to Chicago.

Your friend is Paulie Gee, or the pizzaiolo at the new Paulie Gee in Chicago? Either way, get your butt in there because Paulie is the MAN. He was a regular on Serious Eats for years before he opened up his first pizzeria. He was in a totally different field but loved making pizza in his back yard. He did tons of research, got amazing at his hobby, then finally took the leap, quit the corporate world, and opened up one of the most successful pizzerias in Brooklyn, now in a few other cities as well. Such an inspiring guy - so much so that he actually inspired a former Serious Eats editor (Adam Kubam) to open his own pizzeria as well. He makes some incredible bar-style pizza at Margot in NYC.

Oddly while growing up in Ohio it was a long time before I ever saw pepperoni cooked on a pizza so that it curled and darkened. The popular local chain; Cornersburg Pizza only put the pepperoni on the pizza after it was done cooking.

still its nice to read articles who go out of their way to find out something you didn't think you needed to think about

He didn't address one of the most important aspects of pizza making, though: the heat source itself!

Other pizzas use a variety of heat sources, but Neapolitan pizza is baked at between 750 and 1,000 degrees in wood-burning ovens. I can't imagine even an improperly-packed pepperoni wouldn't curl a bit under 800+ degrees of real flame. Of course the stuffing causes density changes, but at a certain point the surface tension/temperature differential will simply have to cause some curling. Next time i'm at my friend's house for a bonfire i'll toss a couple different forms of pepperoni in to test this.

Please report back!

FYI, for my testing the pizzas were cooked in a home oven at 550°F. Though I really, really doubt that pre-sliced, fiber casing pepperoni will curl at all at any temperature. It kinda just melts and falls into the contour of the cheese all floppy-like.

I have definitely seen natural casing pepperoni (as well as other natural casing cured meats like soppressata) curl on Neapolitan pizzas I've made in 900°F+ ovens.

The short answer is because it has meat in it. The less a pepperoni curls, the lower the percentage of actual meat present. So if it curls, it's higher quality but more gross (cups of grease).

My sister came up with a trick of folding the pepperoni slices into L-shapes and standing them on the pizza. Fits twice as much pepperoni and guarantees a crispy edge, curling or not.

Obligatory video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5AZhjhbxf8 (NSFW. strong language)

The Pizza-My-Heart in Palo Alto on University (the only one I've been to and can speak to) serves these curled pepperonis consistently.

Kenji's The Food Lab book is a must buy and only $27 on Amazon right now.

I made is as far as "grease chalice"... Ick.

This isn't a hard question. There's two reasons pepperonis curl. One is that the top is cooking faster than the bottom, and as with any piece of meat that will cause it to curl towards the surface being cooked faster.

The other reason is that the edge of the pepperoni cooks faster than the middle, that means that the edge experiences tension which causes the pepperoni to fold.

And a third reason is simply because pepperonis can't be bothered to wget

I don't wget the joke

on systems where wget isn't installed the common practice to download a file is `curl -O`

Depends on the -source of the links.

For this application, I feel you'd be better off with HTTPie.

No really, it's ace: https://github.com/jkbrzt/httpie

And yet, his experiments suggest that how the sausage is packed can exacerbate curling in one direction over another.

Yet there are pepperonis that don't curl (which some pizzerias allegedly prefer) as discussed in the article. It appears that the way the pepperoni is stuffed, so that the meat forms a U if you take a cross section, gives it a propensity to curl in the first place.

The article addresses both of these factors and introduces an additional important factor your comment doesn't mention. It may be a harder question than you think.

You didn't read the article. You're partly wrong. He explains why you are partly wrong and much more.

because it doesn't like wget

Boom. The pepperoni library is browser download only.

Pepperoni is a disgusting low quality topping. I mean "cheese pizza" is basically a pizza without toppings. But when the cheapest possible pizza is being made, the topping is always pepperoni. It makes sense - it's cut paper thin and sparsely arranged around the pizza to save on costs.

The next cheapest topping is Canadian bacon, which is not even bacon, but a type of ham. That's basically false advertisement, since bacon is awesome, but Hawaiian-style pizzas are not. Again, arranged in thin small slices around the pizza.

And if your pizza has sausage on it, it usually has too many spices and tastes disgusting like pizza bagel bites.

I guess I forgot to mention "vegetarian" pizzas which have the cheapest toppings yet cost the same. Avoid at all costs.

When I get pizza it usually contains chicken, but I wouldn't mind bacon, pulled pork, shrimp, etc. I just avoid most of the above cheap ingredients since they make pizza taste the same as the $3.50 frozen kind.

Why exactly did you feel the need to share any of that drivel?

Morning coffee didn't kick in yet.

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