Why does pepperoni taste so good

Cheese and tomato sauce are like a perfect marriage. On their own, they taste pretty good. But according to culinary scientists, they contain flavor compounds that taste even better when eaten together. Another quality of pizza that makes it so delicious: Its ingredients become brown while cooking in the oven. The first is called caramelization , which happens when the sugars in a food become brown. Most foods contain at least some sugar; once foods are between and degrees, their sugars begin to turn brown.

Caramel is made from several thousand compounds , making it one of the most complex food products. On a pizza, ingredients like onions and tomatoes become caramelized during baking, making them rich and sweet and flavorful. That brown and crispy crust is also the result of the dough caramelizing. The Maillard reaction occurs when the amino acids in high-protein foods like cheese and pepperoni react with the sugars in those foods when heated.

Pepperonis that become crispy with curled edges, and cheese that browns and bubbles, are examples of the Maillard reaction at work. Of all of the elements that go into the pizza debate, toppings is one of them. Pineapple is a touchy subject. You can never have too much cheese. Pepperoni is a popular, greasy favorite, but what is pepperoni?

It's meat, of course. Other than that assumption, we don't typically give this much thought. Now it's time to dive in and know exactly what we're eating. Pepperoni is everything but Italian. Italian-Americans created pepperoni in the s, which actually just translates to large peppers in Italian. Salami would be the real Italian version of pepperoni. The ubiquitousness of pepperoni on American pizza and not Italian has something to do with that construction, says Ezzo. In Italy, he explains, pizza was just dough, baked, then topped with cheese and fresh basil, with tomatoes arriving from the New World and coming into the picture in the late 19th century.

Meanwhile, in New York, Italians did their best to approximate using what they had. That meant using the ample tomatoes, but also substituting dried oregano for the fresh basil. Many of the meats they made from back home--capicola, he offers, as an example--took too long to make to be wasted on a pizza. Ezzo's pepperonis only hang for one to three weeks, depending on the style, before they're sliced and sent to pizzerias, other meats can take months.

Then, he says, began to trickle into toppings selections around the country. Prior to that, it would have been on menus, but as an appetizer, like a cured meat plate, perhaps with pickles. Last year in the US, Domino's went through 29 million pounds of pepperoni.. Both chains opened just as pizza's popularity burst, paralleled by the growth of pepperoni as a topping.

That, says Caplan, is unlikely to be coincidental. Distributing to multiple locations, they needed ones that were easy to supply, unlike, say, fresh chicken—a popular pizza topping early on.