A hot piping pizza, a warm serve of lasagne, a grilled cheese sandwich; if you are a foodie the first thing coming to your mind is – CHEESY. What better than a thick crust of pizza with a warm gooey melting layer of cheese! But why is mozzarella the first choice when making a pizza? Why are mozzarella sticks so addictive? With more than 500 varieties of cheese around the world, mozzarella is one of the most well-known cheeses owing to its sensory and rheological parameters. Of course, people go for other alternatives when trying new pizza dishes. But then, a classic stays a classic!
Photograph by : www.thehalalfoodblog.com
Mozzarella cheese originated from Italy and was made from Buffalo’s milk as early as in the 16th century (1). A few years back, some scientists from the UK, New Zealand, and China worked on some cheeses to find out why mozzarella was the best cheese for pizza. They measured some characteristics of cheese namely elasticity, color, moisture, and oil content, and found out that mozzarella had optimum composition for a perfect stretchy slice of pizza. These characteristics of cheese are usually acquired after baking. To understand what happens while baking, first let us understand how is the cheese made.
All cheese-making processes start at the same basic step – curdling of milk. The curdling is caused by an enzyme, rennet. Milk which consists of casein and whey protein chains gets separated. The whey is drained off and the curd consisting of casein proteins are pressed and aged. For the making of mozzarella, a few additional steps are followed. The curd formed is soaked in hot salty water which forms long strands of proteins in the curd. The block is then continuously kneaded and stretched in one direction making the cheese stringy (2).
Cheese formed now consists of strands of protein and globules of fat. When this cheese is heated, the water entrapped in this structure of cheese tries to escape and in the process forms a bubble inside the cheese. The cheese may be elastic which will allow a larger bubble to form or not elastic which will restrict the size of the bubble. Simultaneously, some oil from the cheese will also move out and form an oily coating on top of the cheese. So, if the bubble formed is large it will break that oil layer and steam would escape, also steaming off the rest of the moisture in the cheese causing a slightly brown color to form on the top layer. However, if the bubble is too small it will be unable to furnish this brown color on the top. As discovered by the scientists at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, Mozzarella checked off all of these boxes.
Moving into the details of the experiment, Dr. Bryony James and her team worked on different varieties of cheese, namely Mozzarella, Cheddar, Colby, Edam, Emmental, Gruyere, and Provolone. They used these for making pizza and subsequently the color and color uniformity was captured by using a machine vision system and image analysis techniques. Apart from these, they also measured oil, moisture, water activity, rheology, transition temperature, and temperature profiles. Mozzarella’s color quantities were significantly different from other varieties. Other cheeses failed in some aspect or the other. Cheddar, Colby, and Edam were not elastic enough, Gruyere and provolone were too oily and Emmental wasn’t moist enough. Mozzarella’s stretchability and browning properties crowned it as the ultimate cheese for pizzas. Although browning of the coating of cheese is desirable, excessive browning or scorching is not. Another important feature of the experiment was that sauce was not included in the experiment as it would interfere with the steam content inside the pizza (4).
If your slice of pizza is too cheesy and stringy, then it let off its steam already! Let off yours by having a piping hot cheesy pizza.
References
2. Why is mozzarella cheese so stretchy, www.sciencefocus.com
3. Quantification of Pizza Baking Properties of Different Cheeses, and Their Correlation with Cheese Functionality, Xixiu Ma, Murat O. Balaban, Lu Zhang, Emma A.C. Emanuelsson-Patterson, and Bryony James, Journal of Food Science
4. Why Mozzarella Is The Perfect Pizza Cheese, According to Science, www.firstwefeast.com
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