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Pizza is arguably the most eaten restaurant dish on the planet, and at the same time one of the least studied. Across three volumes plus a separate recipe manual, 1,708 pages in total, the Modernist team sets out to fix that. Volume one covers pizza's history, its styles, and the places in the world where it's made best. Volume two covers the fundamentals: dough, sauce, cheese, toppings, and equipment. Volume three is the recipes, over 1,000 of them, both traditional and avant-garde.
The chapter on ovens is the heart of the work, since pizza is ultimately a matter of heat transfer and energy rather than ingredients. Here they dig into what actually happens between stone, air, and dough, and why the same recipe behaves completely differently in two ovens showing the same temperature.
The scope is what surprises. New York, artisan, deep dish, focaccia, al taglio, Detroit, and Brazilian thin-crust pizza are treated as equally valid styles with their own logic, plus gluten-free versions. Neapolitan pizza gets its place but not its usual pedestal, which will irritate some people, and rightly so according to the authors themselves.
Behind it all are Nathan Myhrvold and Francisco Migoya, the same duo behind Modernist Bread, and the work is built on extensive travel and hundreds of controlled experiments. The method is the same as in their other works: change one variable at a time, document it, and ignore what tradition claims until it's proven itself.
That someone throws this much resources at pizza says either something about pizza or something about Myhrvold. Probably both.
Format: Hardcover, three volumes plus recipe manual in a steel case
Number of pages: 1708
Language: English
First published: 2021
