113 lines
6.1 KiB
Markdown
113 lines
6.1 KiB
Markdown
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categories = ["food"]
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tags = ["reverse-engineer","MOD"]
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date = 2024-07-19T15:27:08Z
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description = ""
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draft = false
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slug = "mod-pizza-cust"
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title = "🍕 MOD Pizza Crust"
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author = "nicholas"
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Once again, I document my attempt to replicate a delicious food item, equipped with a few sample pizzas, a spreadsheet, guesswork, and a few iterations. The target is the original thin crust pizza from MOD, a made-on-demand fast-casual food chain. Imagine Subway, except pizza. It is not important to know details of the business, except that on occasion it births from its ovens some of the most delightful pizza crust one can conceive.
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This is a baking operation, not a cooking one. It is very much about the crust. The objective is to create a crust that is crispy and light. This is different than crunchy. I do not want the crust to be crunchy. I do not want the pizza to be dense. It needs to be thin and strong and crispy and light. With the methods and recipe described in this post I am able to consistently achieve each of the desirable characteristics described here.
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## Nutrition
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The first place to start is the nutrition information for the food product. The MOD website provides nutrition info for the 11" thin crust. The reflow after I resize the viewport gives me this unfortunate little ugly table. It has what I want though.
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{{< image
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src="images/mod_nutrition_table.PNG"
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caption="MOD nutrition table" >}}
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## Ingredients
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Also supplied by the website is the ingredient list. These ingredients are very standard and contain no surprises. It is not exciting whatsoever, which leads me to believe the magic of the crust is not at all in the ingredients, but in the preparation.
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{{< image
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src="images/mod_ingredient_list.PNG"
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caption="MOD ingredient list" >}}
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## Recipe Development
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Below I outline the process of reverse-engineering the recipe by identifying the components of interest and extracting from the two tables of data some useful numbers with which to concoct a formula.
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* Fat
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* Right away we know exactly how much extra virgin olive oil we will use in the formula.
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* evoo is the only ingredient that appreciably contributes to the total fat. It is straightforward that there will be 6g of evoo per dough ball.
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* Salt
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* Similarly, but with additional wrinkle, we know the salt amount.
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* The amount of sodium (not salt, per se) can used to calculate the amount of salt, using the following formula:
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* (1310/1000)*2.54 = salt (g)
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* Flour
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* Once again, since we are given values for carbohydrates, and flour is composed of a known portion of carbohydrates (76% by weight), we can calculate the weight of flour by:
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* 88 / 0.76 = flour (g)
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* Water
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* I am not given anything about the water. The water content will need to be relatively low. This results in a dryer and therefore crispier crust.
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* I use ~50% water.
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* Yeast
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* The yeast content will depend on how I choose to prepare the dough. For example, if I want to cold ferment the dough for several days, which I do, I would use much less than if I wanted to ferment the dough only an hour.
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* I write this recipe to include instructions to cold-ferment dough balls for two to three days as it resulted in a crust with the most tiny little bubbles, which I have convinced myself quite unscientifically must be a sign of a crispier crust. Really though, the tiny bubbles look good to me.
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* Long fermentation times provide much time flexibility.
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{{< image
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src="images/pizza-baking.JPG"
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caption="Pizza baking" >}}
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{{< video
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src="videos/pizza-assembly.mp4"
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width="100%"
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autoplay=true
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loop=true
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>}}
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This table reflects the calculations and reasoning described above.
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| Ingredient | Amount (g) |
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| ---------- | ---------- |
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| flour | 116.00 |
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| fat | 6.00 |
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| salt | 3.30 |
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| water | 58.00 |
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| yeast | 0.60 |
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## Recipe
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While the recipe is indeed derived from the information above, it is certainly not the exact same one. Nor are the methods the same – MOD uses methods and equipment not available to me, such as a heated dough press that compresses and form the dough into a neat round disc, all while preserving air pockets. When heated, these air pockets will expand with hot vapor and eventually form a light and airy crust, even under the immense wet weight of my long list of toppings. Rolling out the dough by any other means is destructive to these air pockets and make for a less-crispy crust. Also available to MOD is a specially designed oven that reaches temperatures beyond 550 degrees F, and a cooking surface whose conductive properties are more finely tuned for such a pizza. My baking steel is highly conductive! Therefore, the goal is not necessarily to replicate the product through their processes and equipment, but instead to replicate the end product however it is possible.
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### Formulation
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| Ingredient | Baker's % |
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| ------------------- | ----------- |
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| Flour, 11.6% | 100.00% |
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| Water | 50.00% |
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| Yeast, Instant, Dry | 0.50% |
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| Salt | 2.75% |
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| Oil | 5.00% |
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| Sugar | 1.00% |
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| **TOTAL** | **159.25%** |
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### Process
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1. **Mix** the ingredients.
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2. **Shape** the dough into balls.
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3. **Cold ferment** the dough for **24–72 hours**.
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4. **Roll out** each dough ball to **11 inches** in diameter.
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5. **Preheat** the baking steel for **45 minutes** at **500°F**.
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6. **Lower** the oven temperature to **450°F**.
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7. **Bake** for **11 minutes**.
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8. **Transfer** the baked items to a cooling rack and cool for **5 minutes**.
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## Results
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Here are the results from a couple of pizzas I made using the dough recipe.
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{{< image
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src="images/supreme-pizza.jpg"
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caption="Supreme pizza" >}}
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{{< image
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src="images/crust-underside.JPG"
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caption="Crust leopard spotting" >}}
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I have succeeded in producing a crispy, light, thin and strong crust.
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## Variation
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To make an even crispier crust, I dried out the bottom of the crust. The dough is rolled out, inverted, dried overnight, flipped, topped, and finally baked.
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Done. |