Today’s culinary quandary is: how to we put pizza with garlic bread, and when do we cut the pizza so as to avoid a cheestastrophe (you know, when you cut the slice and the cheese falls everywhere but the pizza)? Garlic bread. Its lightly sweet taste, crunchy exterior and its perfect garlic aroma that makes you say, “I’ll take a bite, bad breath be darned!” are a clarion call for Americans of all generations. Enter my pizza test kitchen as we explore my 3-cheese garlic bread pizza to find the answer.
How does garlic work?
Ahh, garlic, one of the best ingredients on Earth, and also one of the most frequently abused and misunderstood. How does it work and how do we use it in something like garlic bread? Let’s explore allicin.
Allicin gives garlic taste (which, by the way, is mellow and sweet under the right conditions). Allicin is only produced when garlic’s cell walls are ruptured (i.e. cut, crushed, chewed, etc. etc.) and special enzymes in the garlic get busy. The more ruptures (cuts), the more allicin is produced, which means your garlic gets more flavorful the smaller you chop it. Leaving the garlic larger results in less flavor. The trick is that those flavor-making enzymes don’t go on siesta once you’re done cutting — they will only stop producing allicin when the garlic is cooked to a temperature of 150 degrees or higher.
So try not to cut garlic too far in advance, because if you do, you’ll end up with a strident, borderline offensive garlic taste. Offensive = bad, mellow = good.
What does that mean for getting a great garlic taste into our garlic bread? We know that we can’t chop the garlic and throw it in the dough — it’ll develop off flavors. We know that we can’t just grate it into the sauce either — that’ll flavor the sauce, not the dough. No, if we really want the right flavor, we’ll need to add the garlic when we parbake the crust (at a mere 350 degrees). Added with a little bit of butter prior to the sauce and other toppings, you’ll get a super flavorful garlic crust that doesn’t overpower the sauce or toppings. Then, when you crank the oven heat to 500 and toss the garlic bread crust in with toppings galore, the garlic will be protected from direct heat. That means it won’t burn and taste like a shipment of sulfur straight from the nearest volcano.
Now, some of you will say that just tossing raw garlic into the dough will do all of this just fine, but every single time I tried to do that (and I tried lots and with no fewer than 10 different methods), the garlic was either impossible to taste or it tasted metallic and destroyed the experience. The one way that I found you could put garlic straight into the dough was if the garlic was roasted first, but that’s only because the enzymes responsible for allicin production were already eat activated and then heat deactivated. If you want to go that route, it’s fine, too.
When to Cut
Your pizza is fresh out of the oven, cheese still oozing everywhere. You’re starving, and start cutting before the pie’s even had a chance to cool down. And you then you cry as the cheese goes everywhere but on the pizza. Cheesetastrophes are well-known tragedies in kitchens across America. But it can be prevented by one simple step:
WAIT 3 MINUTES TO CUT YOUR DANG PIZZA!
I know it sounds trivial. Maybe you’re afraid that the pizza will get cold. Maybe you grew up in a large family and know that the early bird gets the pizza slice. But it ain’t gonna get cold, and you can defend the slice you want in other ways!
Here’s why. Cheese never actually melts. It’s held together mostly by a protein called casein that forms networks to give the cheese structure. A little bit like gluten in bread. When you apply heat to cheese, this structure changes shape and looks like it’s melting. When the cheese cools back down, that structure firms up again and the cheese looks solid. How does this help us avoid cheesetastrophes when we cut the pizza?
When the casein protein structure is flowing, it doesn’t like to cut. Think of it like bread dough. Before it’s baked, it’s pretty difficult to cut. But after you’ve thrown it in the oven and it firms up, it cuts very, very easily. In practice, it’s the same with the casein in the cheese. Just, you know, the other way around.
No cheese loss means better aesthetics and better aesthetics mean that we perceive the food to be tastier (you really do eat with your eyes!). So don’t ruin your pizza even slightly by cutting at the wrong time.
And that’s all for today! Go forth, enjoy your pizza! And looooooove that garlic taste!
- 15 oz. (~425g or 3 cups) all-purpose flour
- 2 tsp salt
- 2 tsp sugar
- 2 tsp instant yeast (sometimes this is marketed as rapid-rise)
- 2 Tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
- ⅞ cup water <---- if that's too hard to measure, just fill up a cup and use almost, but not quite, all of it)
- 1 cup heavy cream (pasteurized only, please, not ultra-pasteurized)
- 3 Tbsp butter
- 3 oz. good parmesan cheese (the real stuff, if you can find it)
- 3 oz. mozzarella (not fresh, for these purposes)
- 3 oz. pecorino romano
- 3 oz. parmesan cheese
- Mix all dry ingredients in food processor and pulse until combined (3-5 times)
- Add water and oil and run the food processor until the entire mixture forms a ball
- Take out of food processor, roll into a uniform ball and let sit, covered for at least 30 minutes, though you can chuck it in the fridge for up to 24 hours (and the longer it rests, the more flavor it'll get)
- About 20 minutes before you'll uncover the dough, grate the parmesan and measure out the butter and the cream
- Put the cream and the butter together in a small saucepan and heat over low until the butter has melted and the milk is steaming (roughly 140 degrees, if you have your handy IR thermometer ready)
- Add parmesan and stir until thick (cut the heat as soon as the parmesan is completely melted)
- Start preheating oven to 500 degrees (with one rack set as high as possible with a pizza stone on it)
- Divide dough in two balls and let rest, covered, for 20 minutes
- Grate cheeses
- Once dough has rested, transfer onto well floured or cornmeal-ed pizza peel and push out in a circle with your fingertips until it's about 8 inches from edge to edge, and then stretch gently until it's about 12-13 inches or so
- Put ⅓ cup sauce on each pizza and top with ½ of the cheese on each pizza
- Put in oven one at a time for roughly 10 minutes each
- Let rest for 3 minutes and enjoy!
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