
The Food Lab: Why Does Pepperoni Curl? - pepys
http://slice.seriouseats.com/archives/2012/12/the-pizza-lab-why-does-pepperoni-curl.html
======
gomox
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...](http://aht.seriouseats.com/archives/2010/05/the-burger-lab-how-to-
make-perfect-mcdonalds-style-french-fries.html)

~~~
tomkinstinch
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](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/](http://heritageradionetwork.org/series/cooking-issues/)

~~~
pimeys
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...

~~~
wheels
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/](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.

~~~
linker3000
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/](http://chillipepperpete.com/)

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

~~~
sosborn
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.

~~~
tomkinstinch
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-...](http://sweets.seriouseats.com/2013/12/the-food-lab-the-best-
chocolate-chip-cookies.html)

(Recipe:) [http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2013/12/the-food-lab-
best...](http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2013/12/the-food-lab-best-
chocolate-chip-cookie-recipe.html)

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

------
mpetrovich
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?"

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

Fact.

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cpr
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.

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

~~~
cpr
Good point! Nice to see you here.

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

~~~
harveywi
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/](http://socg2016.cs.tufts.edu/)

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

------
fefifofu
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.

~~~
cyphar
> 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.

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

------
sachinag
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...](http://www.chicagotribune.com/dining/restaurants/ct-paulie-gees-
chicago-opening-20160705-story.html)

~~~
kenjilopezalt
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.

------
Shivetya
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

------
peterwwillis
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.

~~~
kenjilopezalt
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.

------
JakeAl
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).

------
phaedrus
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.

------
coldtea
Obligatory video:

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

------
bttf
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.

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

------
0xffff2
I made is as far as "grease chalice"... Ick.

------
ebbv
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.

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

~~~
martin-adams
I don't wget the joke

~~~
jc4p
on systems where wget isn't installed the common practice to download a file
is `curl -O`

------
brianolson
because it doesn't like wget

~~~
nickthemagicman
Boom. The pepperoni library is browser download only.

------
iopq
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.

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

~~~
iopq
Morning coffee didn't kick in yet.

