A classic hot pizza will have a tender and gooey center with a crust that’s as dry and crispy as an eggshell. Let’s consider what makes the pizza so perfect-not the alchemy between sauce and cheese, but the texture. The problem with the pizza box starts with the pie itself. But none of that matters: Ye olde pizza box refuses to die. ![]() Since the introduction of this corrugated vessel, humanity has landed on the moon, rolled out the internet, created cellphones, and invented combination air fryer–instant pots. You’ll see the same design both in dinky spots for drunken college students and in the country’s most sought-after Neopolitan joints. Today, boxes are shallow cardboard squares with flaps to lock them into place. Then, boxes were shallow cardboard squares with flaps to lock them into place. Sliding a $40 pie into a pizza box is the packaging equivalent of parking a Lamborghini in a wooden shed before a hurricane.Īnd yet, the pizza box hasn’t changed much, if at all, since it was invented in 1966. The fancier the pizza, the worse the results: A slab of overbaked Domino’s will probably be at least semi-close to whatever its version of perfect is by the time it reaches your door, but a pizza with fresh mozzarella cooked at upwards of 900 degrees? Forget it. The pizza degrades as soon as it goes inside,” turning into a swampy mess.Ī pizza box has one job-keeping a pie warm and crispy during its trip from the shop to your house-and it can’t really do it. “I don’t like putting any pizza in a box,” Andrew Bellucci, a legendary New York City pizza maker of Andrew Bellucci’s Pizzeria, told me. The most iconic delivery food of all time is bad at surviving delivery, and the pizza box is to blame. ![]() Pizza delivery, it turns out, is based on a fundamental lie. The cardinal rule of restaurants is that to-go food is never as good as the real deal, but even when my homemade pizzas sit around for too long, they don’t taste anywhere near that off. They’re still fine in that takeout-pizza way, but a certain je ne sais quoi is gone: For the first time, after opening up a pizza box and bringing a slice to my mouth, I am hyperaware of a limp sogginess to each bite, a rubbery grossness to the cheese. The pies from my usual takeout spot just don’t seem to taste the same anymore. But enlightenment is not without its consequences.
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