Why does pepperoni curl? (2019)
seriouseats.comThe simple fix for this is to carefully pick the pepperoni off the pizza, and replace it with pineapple chunks.
This is the worse comment I've ever read on HN, I'm not down voting you because that's what you want!
I'm not gonna lie, I love pineapple on pizza: 50% because of the flavour, and the other 50% to troll people who don't like it xD
Them: “you get three toppings”
Me: “triple pineapple!!!”
The Roman candle in Madison - https://www.theromancandle.com/_files/ugd/defcf6_d7cdba534c7...
> PPP Pepperoni
> original sauce, cheese & three kinds of pepperoni
Looking at the toppings, these are: pepperoni, artisan pepperoni, and diced pepperoni.
Jesus Christ... it's Jason Bourne
This comment is why Elon cannot be allowed to take over Twitter.
I feel so offended by a seemingly simple comment. Kudos.
I don't see anything preventing me from having both
Given you like pineapple on pizza, then pepperoni and pineapple is delicious on pizza together.
This. Pineapple, a sweet topping, should be paired with a salty topping for optimum flavor.
My preference is anchovies.
I was going to reply the same thing! Pineapple and anchovies are simply fantastic on a pizza! I also like hot sauce for a splash of heat. I know what I'm having for dinner tonight!!
I worked at a pizza place Back in the Day, and this was the galaxy brain combination.
You are a monster.
For some reason, I find this ironic coming from "onionisafruit"
Not in Sweden.
I have always known there is something fundamentally wrong with Sweden... Thankfully we are not enslaved by them anymore.
And you got a better version of Taskmaster (guessing Norway, but it would be true for the other two as well).
Kongen Befaler is fantastic.
I think the existence of flying jacob should have been your first clue.
Pizza fruit of choice here is the banana.
The only fruit that belongs on pizza is durian.
Soon to be Nato MILSPEC.
I prefer my pizza without fruits, thankyouverymuch. Also I'm not a fan of cheese and I like a dough with more yeast to raise for longer, at least 2/3 inches. This way I can slice it and spread whatever topping I want after it cooks. I call this pizza Pane.
No fruit? So no tomatoes/tomato sauce either?
I actually like pineapple on pizza. But not as much as I like pepperoni.
Why not combine both?
To maximum your nitrosamine exposure, replace peperoni with ham, then add pineapples.
Because they don't know how to Wget :-)
I'd rather have my pepperoni curled than wgot
It is funny, I've never thought of it, but pepperoni curling is a strong sign of quality to me, on a thicker crust pizza at least.
For a thin, greasy pizza, I expect a flat pepperoni for some reason. This is a bit weird because thin, greasy pizzas are obviously the better kind.
Why do people want thin pizza? I think its because they are used to shitty dough. The dough is 1/3rd the of magic on a good pizza and I want to enjoy it. Could you imagine people demanding thin toast? Thin bagette? It's a ludicrous idea to me.
> I think its because they are used to shitty dough.
Whaaaaat? The best and only original Pizza is the thin stone oven baked one, please visit Naples to experience it.
The thick fake ones you can also call pizza because they are round, but it is just stuff on shitty sugar white bread, ludicrous to me you just don't eat a toast or a baguette then
True traditionalists insist on rosewater and sugar.
I have! It's fine. Could be better.
> sugar white bread
You mean cake?
Cake has eggs.
So do enriched breads like brioche.
> Could you imagine people demanding thin toast?
Not sure about “demanding” but Melba Toast would like a word with you.
Thick pizza seems to me like bread with toppings, it can be tasty, but it is not true Italian pizza.
Nah, there are a bajillion ways of making pizza in Italy, it’s just that the thick and soft one is never round, but even the round one can be thicker or thinner depending on the local preference. It would actually be interesting to find out if the American style of pizza was influenced by a traditional Sicilian pizza called “sfincione” which is still very popular, given the strong Sicilian component of Italian immigration in the US.
On the other hand, Italian pizza can be too thin. For me, I like a crust that is thin but still has a soft inside with that lovely bread taste.
But only a fool would be searching for something other than true Chicago pizza to begin with!
Chicago style is really incredible.
Pizza is American though, not Italian.
Yeah, like pizza that doesn't come from Italy. And has pineapple on it.
My two favorite pizzas (Grimaldi’s brick oven and Giordano’s stuffed) have excellent dough and thin crusts. The crisp crunch and carbonization of a brick oven crust adds texture and flavor. The buttery decadence of a stuffed pizza crust is not unlike a pie crust - a bit of salt and carbs to offset the sweet acidity of the filling. My mouth is watering just thinking of them.
Thinner pizza means more cheese and toppings and sauce and stuff. I also like thin slices of toasted baguette smothered in brie.
I can imagine people demanding thin crackers, or thin tortillas.
The dough must be pretty thin to be 1/3 of the overall pizza, if the sauce is too thick, you have essentially pizza soup -- and Chicago deep-dish pizza is an entirely regional affair.
For most pizza I think the flavor is in the surface rather than the volume.
Surely you don't think I meant that you MUST split a pizza into 1 third dough, 1 third sauce, 1 third cheese. That would be hilarious, and yeah pretty close to maybe Chicago style (which is excellent), but not at all what the intent of my comment was.
And I've had pizza soup. It was a soup made with standard north american pizza ingredients. It was marvelous.
> Chicago deep-dish pizza is an entirely regional affair
I've eaten it on three continents. It's legit.
Because:
1. that's real (Italian) pizza and not some American bread with topping
2. more bread/dough, more likely you are cheated on weight of toppings
For the same reason like chips. Dough is cheap, that is why USA pizza has a lot of it (plus large portion size).
In my opinion the best pizza in the world is in Ottawa, Ontario!
The people who want thin pizza don't actually like pizza. A thin pizza is no true American pizza.
Man, you seem to have a lot of hot takes on pizza here with zero evidence. As a Canadian I will take my thin pizza, not everything needs to be "American". Disgusting.
I'd think the rest of the world would be OK with letting us take the blame for these thick pizzas (thin is better).
It's all good at the end of the day, but it doesn't have to be thin to be good, nor does it have to (laughably) come from Naples.
And you should put fruit on it too! Right?
You can eat more slices if it is thinner. Also I like a crispy pizza.
Yeah me too, but its not the _only_ good pizza and by no means does that crispy pizza have to come from flipping Naples.
As European that looks like very very small salami almost closer to kielbasa, I'm regularly preparing pizza, maybe if you used bigger salami (diameter) it would be less likely to curly, smaller the diameter, more likely to curl. Salami (6-7cm?) curls for me very little while kielbasa (~3cm?) is much more likely to curl, naturally this can be avoided by cutting thicker pieces.
Related helpful kitchen tip: To stop pepperoni from curling on a pizza, take away their little brooms.
Or you could stop eating frozen pizza…
I love Kenji, he’s so methodical when it comes to testing food.
Seeing the title, I honestly thought there is a tool/command named pepperoni, which for some unknown reason, using curl to fetch data from URLs.
I honestly thought this was going to be about a new version of cURL with a hipster name.
I never understood why you would call salami pepperoni instead. How do you order a pizza with peppers (=pepperoni) in the US?
> How do you order a pizza with peppers
just like that. "pizza with peppers".
Just let me say what a disappointment it was when I ordered a pepperoni pizza after a long flight, expecting lovely sausage but got a bunch of bell peppers on there instead...
I can imagine it must be just as bad for a vegetarian experiencing the reverse situation.
Because it is seasoned with (bell)peppers.
I'd venture to say the outside top edge cooks first and dries out, thus shrinks when the fat and moisture escapes.
In the spirit of TFA, if your hypothesis were true, what evidence could we find that would be consistent with it? What evidence would disprove it?
It's because the top side is closer to the sun.
So they cup upside down at night!
Truly a tour de force of culinary engineering on par with the best that the CIA* has to offer.
*Culinary Institute of America
What it should look like is [...] "picture of burned pepperoni". I don't eat pepperoni but either way we disagree here. Yes sometimes parts of a pizza get burned. We don't eat those parts. But whereas that appears feasible with a part of dough, it does not with a topping like that.
Because it's not food, but recycled food industry waste. It's not even a proper name for this topping, it means "pepper" in Italian.
Not really-really.
Pepperoni does not exist as an Italian word.
What the US call "pepperoni" is "salame piccante" in Italy.
Peperone (without the double p, one peperone, two or more peperoni) is the green/yellow/red (not spicy) vegetable that in english is called pepper (undistinguished from "pepper", the spicy grains that in Italian are called "pepe").
>salame piccante
Salame piccante in italy has 0% to do with the crap passed as pepperoni in US pizzas. It's a traditional salami (cured meat). The same way Sprite is not champagne.
>Pepperoni does not exist as an Italian word.
I know, I speak the language. Peperoni however, where the name for the topping was copied from, does, and is the plural for a kind of pepper (bell pepper).
Peperoni or pepperoni (which is often referred in both "p" and "pp" version in the US), is obviously a copy of the italian word "peperone", out of context, to make it sound as this crap is some traditional italian ingredient.
> is the green/yellow/red (not spicy) vegetable that in english is called pepper
Bell pepper to be exact.
Yes, though bell pepper is I believe mainly US/Canada:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_pepper
>The terms bell pepper (US, Canada, Philippines), pepper or sweet pepper (UK, Ireland, South Africa, Zimbabwe), and capsicum (Australia, Bangladesh, India, Malaysia, New Zealand, Pakistan and Sri Lanka) are often used for any of the large bell-shaped peppers, regardless of their color. The fruit is simply referred to as a "pepper", or additionally by color ("green pepper" or red, yellow, orange, purple, brown, black).[6] In the Midland region of the U.S., bell peppers, either fresh or when stuffed and pickled, are sometimes called mangoes.
Most cured meat products are ways to preserve cheaper cuts of meat for a long time.
Salamis, mortadellas, head cheese.
That doesn't mean they're not delicious.
>Most cured meat products are ways to preserve cheaper cuts of meat for a long time.
Which is neither here, nor there. We're a long from that being the only case, in italy, france, spain, etc. there are cured meat products that cost more than your house (well, close enough), as well as tons of excellent, well prepared, well aged, high quality cured meat.
"Pepperoni" is not that. It's the cured meat equivalent of spray cheese.
And there is absolute crap cured meat in those countries too. The most disgusting pizza I've ever had was a Dr Oetker's frozen pizza with gross salami as topping. Seems like the brand is sold in Italy: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2005856/Ristorante-...
>Dr Oetker's frozen pizza
I'll stop you right here...
If you're Italian you don't buy "frozen pizza". You make your own, or you go to a good pizzeria...
Seem like at least some do: https://www.statista.com/statistics/912207/frozen-pizza-sale...
https://ihsmarkit.com/research-analysis/booming-italian-froz...
My point is that every country has good and bad food. You can find some of the worst “cheese” in the us, but also amazing artisan kinds that is is exuberantly priced. American country ham has won over Parma and iberico in blind tests by experts. There isn’t one Italy or one United States or one Sweden. It all depends on where you look…
Then why do frozen pizzas exist in Italian supermarkets?
Well, there's an opera in Nebraska as well, but I wouldn't consider it as some indicator of the state's cultural preferences...
I'm afraid the downvoters don't want to know how the sausage is made. (Sorry)
I don't remember the exact chemical reaction names, but pepperoni shouldn't really be heated like this anymore. I think the reason is that some of the resulting chemicals are cancerogene.
It’s nitrates, which become nitrosamines.
As I posted below, here’s a basic summary: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/nitrosamin...
Heated like what? Do you mean in an oven, or in a manner in which part of it chars?
I haven't heard anything specific to pepperoni; but I have heard that about charred meat generally (primarily beef), but there are so many confounding factors in everything from genetics to temperature to cooking method to cut of meat it's all but a worthless statement.
As with all things the size of the effect matters. There are many risks I’m willing to take and unless the expected value of eating a pizza sometimes is going to take years off my life, I just don’t care (and I’m thinking of buying a motorcycle so it’s not like very many risks actually matter any more)
The charring, yes. Some of the salts used in curing salami undergo some unfavourable reactions what I remember. So it is much more specific than red meat in general.
Citation? I did some googling and some wikipeding and can't find anything like that.
He’s referring to nitrates becoming nitrosamines.
The only way to avoid this is to cook meats low and slow - which results in frankly unfavorable texture characteristics for pork products like bacon and pepperoni.
See: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/nitrosamin...
If I'm eating pepperoni pizza I'm not too concerned about a little creosote.
Perhaps you mean the Maillard reaction? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maillard_reaction
Eh. Somehow I doubt that eating charred food or fast-cooked pepperoni is going to kill me faster
Cut a small slit on the edge of the pepperoni.
to check if there is internet connection?
A friendly reminder that the friendly name "Pepperoni" is actually pork, which is actually pig, who have the intelligence of >= 3 year-old humans.
They taste much better than humans.