In 60 seconds
- Four layers, mostly water. A pizza is a bread base, tomato sauce, cheese and toppings. A raw Margherita is about 250 g of dough, 70 g of tomato and 90 g of mozzarella, and more than half of that is water. The oven must drive water out of the base while stopping the water on top from soaking in.
- Dough needs time and hands. The dough is flour, water, salt and a little yeast. Hydration is the water as a share of the flour, about 55 to 62% in Naples. A long, slow ferment of 8 to 24 hours builds flavour. Stretching by hand pushes the gas out to the edge, where it later puffs into the rim. A rolling pin would press it flat.
- Three kinds of heat at once. In a wood-fired dome the hot brick floor heats the base by conduction, the glowing dome and flame heat the top by radiation, and moving hot air adds convection. Radiation grows with the fourth power of temperature, so a dome at 485 °C radiates about five times as hard as a home oven at 250 °C.
- The bake is a race. Wet dough cannot pass 100 °C, because the extra heat goes into boiling water. Only a dried surface can brown. In a wood oven the bottom crisps and the rim bubbles char into leopard spots in 60 to 90 seconds. A home oven needs 8 to 12 minutes, and a preheated stone or steel gives the base the conduction a thin tray cannot.
- Why mozzarella. Mozzarella stretches because its protein was lined up into fibres when the curd was pulled. Steam lifts it into blisters, oil runs off their tops, and the dried tops brown. Fresh mozzarella is over half water and suits a very hot, short bake. Low-moisture mozzarella is drier and browns well in a home oven.
- Styles, conveyors and the box. Every style trades heat against time, from Neapolitan in a minute to Chicago deep dish in over half an hour. Delivery chains use conveyor ovens with jets of hot air, so every pizza bakes the same. The holes in the box let steam out so the crust stays crisp, and the little plastic table keeps the lid off the cheese.
Words worth knowing
| Term | Meaning |
|---|
| Hydration | The weight of water in a dough as a percentage of the weight of flour. |
| Cornicione | The raised rim of a pizza, puffed by the gas that hand stretching pushed out to the edge. |
| Conduction | Heat passing through direct contact, as from the oven floor into the pizza base. |
| Radiation | Heat carried by infrared light from a hot surface such as the oven dome. It rises with the fourth power of temperature. |
| Convection | Heat carried by moving air or liquid. |
| Maillard browning | Reactions between sugars and amino acids that brown a dry, hot surface and make savoury flavours. |
| Leopard spots | Small charred spots on the rim of a wood-fired pizza, where thin bubble skins dried and burnt. |
| Thermal mass | How much heat a body can store. A thick baking stone or steel has a lot, a thin tray very little. |
| Low-moisture mozzarella | A drier mozzarella, 45 to 52% water, made for shredding, melting and browning on pizza. |
A short history
A thousand years from twelve flatbreads owed to a bishop to a food baked, boxed and delivered in every country.
- 997 · The word pizza is written down (A notary of Gaeta, Gaeta, Italy)
- 1830 · Port'Alba: from street stand to pizzeria (Antica Pizzeria Port'Alba, Naples, Italy)
- 1889 · The Margherita story (Raffaele Esposito (by tradition), Naples, Italy)
- 1905 · Pizza reaches New York (Giovanni Albano, Filippo Milone, Gennaro Lombardi, New York, USA)
- 1960 · Domino's bets on delivery (Tom and James Monaghan, Ypsilanti, Michigan, USA)
- 1974 · The little table in the box (Claudio Daniel Troglia; Carmela Vitale, Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Dix Hills, New York, USA)
- 1982 · The conveyor oven (Lincoln and Middleby Marshall, USA)
- 1996 · Domino's and Pizza Hut come to India (Domino's Pizza India (now Jubilant FoodWorks); Pizza Hut, New Delhi and Bengaluru, India)
The full story, with 33 moments, charts, people and 35 sources: glassbox.how/e/pizzaclear/history. The data lives in history.json.
Video and slides
Made with the Glassbox studio from this box's storyboard (window.glassbox.director). Free to reuse under CC BY 4.0.
| File | What | Size |
|---|
glassbox/reel.mp4 | Reel / Short, with captions and soundtrack | 1080×1920 |
glassbox/video.mp4 | YouTube video, with captions and soundtrack | 1920×1080 |
glassbox/slide-1…10.jpg | Instagram carousel | 1080×1350 |
glassbox/thumb.jpg | YouTube thumbnail | 1280×720 |
glassbox/cover.jpg | Share card and repo social preview | 1200×630 |
glassbox/history-reel.mp4 | “History in 10 moments” Reel / Short | 1080×1920 |
glassbox/history-slide-*.jpg | History carousel | 1080×1350 |
glassbox/post.json | Post copy and schedule used by the publish kit | |
Privacy
This box has no accounts and no ads, and it ships its own fonts and libraries. When you run it yourself it sends nothing anywhere. On glassbox.how, the site's /bar.js also loads Glassbox's analytics: Google Analytics to count visits (it asks first in the EU, UK and Switzerland, and stays off when your browser sends Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track) and ClickTrust to detect bots.
It remembers a few things in your own browser only, and never sends them anywhere:
| Browser storage key | What it holds |
|---|
pizzaclear.v1 | Which chapters you have opened, your best quiz scores, and sound on or off. |
Exactly what each one sees is at glassbox.how/privacy.
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