Physicists Have Come Up With the 'Perfect Pizza Equation'

Three scientists have cracked the code for pizza perfection. As Live Science reports, a physicist and a food anthropologist in Rome teamed up with a physicist from Northern Illinois University (who also worked in the Italian capital) to figure out how to use an electric oven to bake pizza that’s as good as a wood-fired one.

Their paper, titled “The Physics of Baking Good Pizza,” was published on the pre-print platform arXiv [PDF]. A seasoned pizza-maker in Rome told the researchers that a brick oven was key to crafting a flawless pizza. It should be set at about 626°F (330°C), and the pie should be baked for just two minutes, the pizzaiolo said.

That’s all well and good if you happen to have a wood-fired brick oven at home, but the researchers wanted to test whether the same results could be achieved in an electric oven with a steel surface. They approached the question from a thermodynamic point of view, using the principles of heat transfer, thermal radiation, and water evaporation—factoring in the thickness and temperature of the bottom of the pizza, as well as other characteristics—to come up with the perfect method of cooking a classic Margherita pizza. In case you’re curious, the equation they arrived at looks like this:

Essentially, what this means is that similar conditions to a brick oven can be achieved in an electric oven by setting the temperature to 450°F (rounded up from 230°C) and leaving the pizza in there for 170 seconds. However, pizzas with toppings that have a higher water content (especially vegetables) should be left in the oven a little longer in order to take the process of evaporation into account.

The result is a perfectly fine pie, but as the researchers admit, “the dry heat and the smell of wood in traditional firebrick ovens remain the ideal way to bake the perfect pizza.”

[h/t Live Science]