Why You Need To Broil Your Pizza: Pepperoni Cups
Pepperoni Cups
Do the words haunt you? They haunt me. In a fat, good, delicious kind of way. Somehow the illuminati algorithms at Instagram figured out I love pizza. I dont know if it was the fact that I post loads of photos of food, that I follow all sorts of food related accounts, maybe that I follow @pizza, or it can just read my brain, but it started showing me a lot of pizza in the Discover tab. Is it called Discover? The one with the magnifying glass.
Normally that wouldn't do it though. I get pictures of amazing pasta, bread, booze. People consuming all those things in amazing places. Those pictures don't haunt me. But one day 'Insta' started showing me pictures of pizza made by Prince Street Pizza in New York. I have never seen pepperoni on pizza look that good. Like every photo. Doesn't matter if it's someone's picture of the pizza order they received or an official photo by the shop itself.
See this Instagram photo by @psp_nyc * 436 likes
I'll give you a minute to pick your jaw up off the floor.
Seriously, WTF. I didn't realize a pepperoni cup was a thing until these photos started showing up. But look at them: perfect grease filled protein challaces. Crispy on the edge and boiling hot savoury in the middle. Combine that with some cheese, tomatoes, and delicious dough. Game over.
So naturally being in love with pizza as a close second to my wife I had to make some pizza. More importantly I needed pepperoni cups on that pizza. Dialed up Instacart: fresh dough, sauce, shredded mozzarella, Olli pepperoni[1]; this was gonna be great. I've made pizza a billion times so this should be easy. Roll out the dough, light coating of a quality sauce, cheese spread, and now the pepperoni. So what was the trick here? Those pepperoni look thicker than normal so rather than buying sliced pepperoni which is almost always paper thin I got a log of the best pepperoni I had easy access to and cut poker chip size slices for topping the pizza. 500°F for about ~7 minutes and I was boarding the bullet train to flavour country.
Well, that train went to flavour country, but unfortunately pepperoni cups didn't live there. What went wrong? I had some thick slices and thinner slices on the pizza and they all came out flat. Delicious, but flat. I always cook pizza high and fast so I couldn't imagine to get cups you needed low and slow. Or did you?
Having failed at getting cups I did a quick search of the Oracle, aka Kenji Lopez-Alt's seriouseats.com site and sure enough theres an article on pepperoni cups. There's some quality research as you'd expect. The main takeaways I got were:
- The size of the nozzle filling the casing during pepperoni construction along with the casing type dictates how the meat product is filled into the casing, most specifically the shape the filling takes when it enters the case. The key is a sort of "U shape" or as I visualized it, like snake being folded, formation of meat in the casing. This was the critical and key element.
- Natural casing. I sort of got lost a little bit in the article about this but basically natural casing causes the meat filling to stick which leads to uneven filling (which is good). Also the cooking dynamics of what's left on the exterior of the pepperoni log once the casing is removed (as it normally is).
- Thickness of pepperoni slice. Too thin doesnt work and neither does too thick. I think my poker chip thickness reference is pretty spot on if you don't feel like measuring your cuts.
- Directional heating. The pan test in the original article basically validates a lot of the theory.
This is basically all you need to know, the question now of course is sourcing said pepperoni. I think you typically want to get this local so it's up to you on calling some folks and asking about the casing. Based on reading general feedback if you can find naturally cased pepperoni you're in good hands. Details on the nozzle and just how much of a 'foldedness' the filling gets at creation are probably only going to come by buying some and doing a biopsy.
While that article basically solved the core element of getting pepperoni cups I still had some questions. Was the dough thickness a control group? Was the amount of cheese per test pizza also a control group? Was the temperature the same each time too? (I think it was). There's a lot of talk about how from a thermodynamic standpoint the key feature of cupping comes from insulating factors from the dough and cheese which leads to uneven heating of the pepperoni slice and then immediate exponential cooking of the edges as the pepperoni edge rises, gets more heat, cooks faster, until you have the said cups. So, I would think, those control groups I mentioned earlier are kinda important. Further, I was just generally curious if a longer cook time could cause the same result. Maybe a longer cooking time, and consequently at a lower temperature, would give more time to render some of the fat in the core of the pepperoni slice and lead to overall crispier cups?
Well hold on to your butts because we're gonna do a pizziaperiment!
Some science:
- We're gonna take one fresh dough ball from Whole Foods and cut it into four equal-as-possible mini balls.
This one came in at 647g which I rounded down to 640 for four equalish cuts.
Roughly 160g each
- Roll the dough out equally using 1/4" rolling pin bands. So at this point we're using roughly the same size pizza in each test rolled to the same thickness. If you want to re-try this at home make sure you have bands for your rolling pin to dictate the thickness. This will be the once-in-a-decade time you actually use bands on your rolling pin to control thickness.
Accept that your pizzas are going to look like huaraches. It's real easy to keep your bands in contact with the surface if you just roll your pizza in one direction. I'm fine being judged for this.
- Measure an allocation of cheese equal for each pizza. While I don't have a scientifically controlled way of distributing the cheese onto the pizza at least the same amount is playing along with the idea of a control group.
Run of the mill italian blend from anyone should work fine. I find this tastier than OG mozzarella. I'm also using WF's organic pizza sauce which tastes pretty good.
56 grams is exactly two servings of this kind of cheese. One serving was just way too sparse to be delicious or any kind of an insulating factor during the pepperoni cooking process.
- Evenly cut pepperoni of poker chip thickness. Seriouseats has this nailed down in their research and I basically eyeballed it here. I think their takeaway was a range that included 4mm?
Eagle Rock Bakery and Deli on Colorado Blvd in Eagle Rock had a great pepperoni log at a good price. While you're there get a combination sandwich. Sooooooo good!
4ish millimeters?
And finally, my sorta spin on the test: cooking times and temperatures. Basically I let the temperature dictate the total cooking time. I know that's kinda deviating from the whole scientific method approach here but basically I want to cook the pizza for as long as it takes to form pepperoni cups or to the most maximum extent before burning. -This is actually easier done than written. It's pretty simple to cook the pizzas to identical colour when they all contain the same amount of dough, sauce[2], and cheese :-D
Squarespace really needs emojis.
So what did we do here?
- 400°F
- The idea here is low and slow. Will a longer cook due to the low temperature yield more time for the pepperoni to render? Is the temperature high enough to cause the uneven heating dynamic central the cup formation?
- 450°F
- Same idea as above but now we're only 50 degrees away from my target. Why not.
- 500°F Ambient
- This is my typical pizza cooking temperature and one I know a lot of people also use.
- 500°F / Broiled
- If you read the Seriouseats article you'll know direction of heat was a major point in the work. I dont have a wood fired oven or something else that permits directional radiation from the heat source. I DO however have a broiler on the top interior of my oven and figured this was probably pretty close. My oven specifications state that the broiler should be considered a 500°F heat source. But, my top rack is very close to the boiler and thought for sure the pepperoni and cheese will cook but my dough might not before everything else is burnt. So in this test I placed the sheet on the bottom shelf.
It should also be noted that I have an air circulator, which is a fancy word for a fan, in my oven. I use this almost always to ensure the entire oven space is an equal temperature (ie. top versus bottom rack cooking). I shelled out $10 on Amazon for two oven thermometers which was cool because it basically validated that my oven turns on around 5° below target and doesn't usually go above 10° past target when reheating. If I don't have the fan turned on the reheat process usually goes much higher, in some cases 40° above target. Fun!
So what happened?
This was 400°F in what came out to 16 minutes. The dough was perfectly done and in my standards so was the cheese. The pepperoni is definitely cooked but there's almost no cupping.
“The low and slow theory is dead.”
Next at bat is 450°F which took 12 minutes to come to what I consider the same colour and doneness. As you can see most of the pepperoni are developing somewhat on the edges but it's just not there.
Close?
Now we're getting somewhere. There's a fair amount of pepperoni most of which are on the exterior ring that had good cuppage and based on their colour definitely had their edges get crispy. 500°F only took 9 minutes.
Definite cuppage but not great.
After thinking about this for a while and taking note of Prince Street's pizza above I think the insulating factor of cheese is more important that I originally assumed. As you can see in this version the pepperoni with the most cupping and the best edges have less cheese. In fact you can clearly see on some where one side of the pepperoni had significantly more cheese and that edge didn't cook as well as the one with less. The third row from the bottom, left-most pepperoni in this picture is a great example.
And finally, 500°F under the broiler. This is why you need to broil your pizza. High, directional heat, basically cooked each pepperoni equally and provided that temperature variation between direct versus ambient. Some pepperoni did make the all star list, like that one center-right, compared to the others but I'm attributing that to there being some sort of dead-on thickness for the pepperoni I can't get because I hand cut them. If you really want to dig deep it might be worth getting a mandolin and experimenting with exactly cut pepperoni -but I dont own one!
Conclusions
- All of the Serious Eats points around heat direction, pepperoni thickness, and pepperoni construction stand. Never really doubted this but have to say it.
- High temperature is critical
- A broiler is probably the only generally equipped home solution to getting the direct heat needed to form pepperoni cups. If you own an oven with it's own broiler compartment where you can't get the pizza far away enough from the flame to prevent burning you might be shit outta luck. You should probably run out and buy yourself a salamander or something.
Further Considerations
- Using a 1/4" band for the dough thickness was too thick for me. It wasn't so thick that it sucked but I just really appreciate a thin crust. Now that we have a lot of other variables nailed down it might be fun to try and see how everything performs with a few different dough thicknesses. Technically less dough means less insulating factor to the pepperoni so this should have some affect.
- Less cheese would definitely attribute to the insulating factor and affect the pepperoni. Might be another good experiment to see how little cheese you can get away with before it's tomato bread with pepperoni. Also the type of cheese. Maybe something like 100% parmesan which is definitely drier than a mix could affect the cups. The Prince Street pizza photo looks a lot like a thick coat of fresh mozzarella so there's definitely something to experiment with.
[1] My understanding through all of this is that Olli Salumeria brand pepperoni does not work due to its casing type. According to their website they use a collagen coated mesh called Hukki as their casing. Since this isn't a natural casing type I assumed this was the source of lack of cuppage. Olli does, however, make a fine array of delicious cured meats so nothing against their product.
[2] You'll note I left out details on sauce and specifically the amount. I can attest this was due to laziness and the assumption that as long as you were putting a thin coat on the dough it shouldn't affect the test much. I usued around two to three spoons worth of Whole Food's organic Pizza Sauce
