Pizza is, without a doubt, the food of the gods.
Whether you keep it simple with a New York-style
slice of cheese or go for Chicago deep dish
loaded with ingredients, all pizzas deliver devine,
rich, cheesy, mouth-watering experiences that
hustle your brain’s pleasure centers into overdrive.
Although the ingredients may change,
all pizza tastes delicious thanks to a complex
chemical symphony of flavor and texture.
Today on Reactions, we want to give you lesson
in chemistry to help better explain the profound
beauty found deep within your favorite pie.
So let’s start with the dough.
Pizza dough is pretty easy to make and has the base
ingredients of flour, salt, yeast, and warm water.
The yeast is actually a living, single celled fungus
that you buy at the store in a dormant state.
It’s normally just called baker’s yeast, but that’s
just laymen’s speak for saccharomyces cerevisiae.
When all of these ingredients are mixed together,
and the yeast is hit with warm water,
it wakes right on up and starts to break down complex
sugars found in the flour, spitting out carbon dioxide
in return, and ultimately making the dough rise.
Once the dough is fully risen and formed into
a pizza shape, the sauce is then added.
Of course, there are all kinds of sauces but all
tomato-based ones have one thing in common – acidity.
Tomatoes are naturally between 4.0 and 4.6 on
the pH scale, but canned tomatoes can be even lower.
This is why some people out there end up getting
acid reflux from overconsumption of pizza.
To balance out an overly acidic pizza sauce,
some people add a tiny pinch of baking soda,
which is basic, Making it an antacid
which helps neutralize the acid burn.
On the topic of acids, let’s get to cheese. Cheese
is basically a byproduct of adding acid to milk.
Milk is made up of proteins called casein and whey, as well as fats.
When acids are added, the casein coagulates to
form cheese, and separates from the whey protein.
To make the cheese stronger, cheese makers
add rennin which helps to keep the casein
molecules bound tightly together.
Cheese has historically been used as a way
to preserve dairy, but what makes the pizza
maker cheese of choice - mozzarella different
is that it’s best eaten freshly made.
It is a super moist, soft cheese, which basically
means that when it’s heated up, it gets really
stretchy and adds and awesome texture
and mouth feel to your pie.
With the basics of pizza down, any pizza maestro
can finish their symphony off with their own
personalized mix of toppings. Different folks,
different strokes, but the final step and
most important is what goes on in the oven,
the place where all toppings become equals.
The first thing to be affected is the cheese.
When cheese meets heat, the fats in the cheese
change from solid to liquid, mozzarella stays
nice and stringy, because calcium ions help
to hold all of the casein proteins together.
Calcium, good for your bones and good for your mozzarella.
Then, when the pizza starts to properly cook,
the holy grail of culinary chemical reactions
begins: the maillard reaction.
At temperatures above 140°C, sugars react with
amino acids to create flavor compounds that give
food that distinct, bold, cooked flavor.
It also is known as the browning reaction
and it happens on the crust, toppings and cheese,
but to add to pizza’s complexity,
under the sauce and toppings, the dough is left
very soft and moist to give every bite
an interesting mixed texture.
Obviously, you’ve all the sudden got
the taste for pizza, so get your phone out
and dial the nearest pizza maestro,
but before you do that don’t forget
to hit the subscribe button there!