Pizza is now a staple food at parties, especially where teenagers are concerned. Pizza-making is an art and a science where the right combination of cheese, dough, toppings, and baking techniques maximizes the flavor of the pizza while minimizing the grease on the pizza. Get it wrong and you get an oil slick pooling on top of the pizza, often soaking the base.
A greasy pizza is the result of the oven-heat extracting the fat present in the pizza ingredients while the pizza sauce and cheese trap it on top of the crust. Traditional pizza bases are made with oil and cheesy is naturally made from milk fat as well. Other toppings such as meats and sausage also play a role in the fat content. Balancing all of the pizza components, including cooking heat is crucial for an enjoyable pizza.
The best pizzas though do have a tiny drip of oil that builds up as you bend a slice inwards just so in order to eat it. This drip should be minute, a quarter-teaspoon or so, just enough to remind you that this is indeed a slice of heaven.
Sources of fat or grease in a pizza
Fat is everywhere, even vegetables have some fat… however, there can be too much fat or grease on a pizza, Restaurants know that fat means flavor and for this reason, they will often add a little oil or butter here and there to make everything taste just so much better, but when this practice is combined with he use of poor ingredients, the end result is a disappointing pool of grease that runs off the pizza as spoils the food. Many people will blame the mozzarella, a natural culprit, after all, it is cheese and cheese is fat right? But what if this was not the only source of grease on your pizza?
- Bad quality cheese: – cheese is the main culprit. Either a poor quality cheese was used with just too much fat, or the store decided to double up on the cheese to impress their customers, not realizing that there is an optimal cheese to pie ratio. More cheese, while visually stimulating also means more fat. Better stores will substitute-in lower fat cheeses (high moisture cheeses are used) in order to reduce the buildup of additional fat. Some stores opt for cheaper mozzarella, which is a synthetic cheese made very similarly to cheddar and which releases more fat.
- Bad quality pepperoni or sausages: higher fat sausages are usually cheaper and carry more flavor. However, they also release much more fat as a result. Buying quality ingredients may cost more, but the end result is worth it.
- Oily sauces:
- Finishing the pizza: – some stores drizzle a little olive oil on top of the pizza once it is cooked. This drizzle does not have time to be absorbed by the dough and can pool on top of the pizza, looking like grease.
- Oven temperature: Fat takes a while to process out of the ingredients. The hotter you cook food, the fast it seals and the faster it cooks. Professional pizza ovens will heat to above 500 °C This minimizes the amount of fat that will squeeze out of the sausage, meats, or cheese used on the pizza. Have a look at pizza that sits on the counter for a while and you will see the grease start to pool slowly after a few minutes. The home oven tends to reach 220 °C and this means that the food takes 3-4 times longer to cook, allowing the fats to be released.
What if it is not grease?
Surprisingly, sometimes what we think is grease is not at all grease, but rather excess water from the ingredients. Modern bacon or chicken is often injected with brine ad if not pre-cooked, the brine will come out during the cooking process and will be trapped on top of the pizza, looking like grease. Similarly, a bad tomato sauce can also be very watery and get trapped between the cheese and the crust, only to run out as you cut or bite into the pizza.
How to avoid a greasy pizza?
- Use softer cheeses (low fat). This sounds counterintuitive to most. A really soft cheese such as brie or a traditional fresh mozzarella has less fat and much more moisture in it, which makes the cheese soft.
- A harder cheese has more fat. Avoid the synthetic or more processed cheeses which are designed to melt easily.
- Why not use a cheese spread such as cream cheese or Boursin and cut back on the traditional cheese? Better flavor, much less fat.
- Cut back on the meat toppings. pre-cooked or cured meats still have a lot of fat in them. The less you use, the better, especially pork toppings. Fat and salt are used as preservatives in sausages, including pepperoni, making these especially bad as toppings. If you really want to use sausage, rather cook it on the side and blot or drip dry before adding it to the pizza. A great way to precook pepperoni or sausage is to simply microwave these for half a minute and dry them with a paper towel.
- Do not add any olive oil to the pizza or sauce. This does not really help the pizza get crispier and only makes the pizza greasier. For that matter, do not add oil to the tomato sauce. There is no need for the sauce to look glossy in the pot and there is no need to use a lot of oil to sweat off any onions or vegetables that might be used as a base for the sauce. Stick to the basics and make a delicious passata with tomatoes that are allowed to simmer down into a luxuriously thick sauce.
- Cook the pizza as hot as possible, as fast as possible. This helps trap some of the fat and seals it in the food, where you will not notice it. Also, a fast-cooked pizza is crispier, providing some support to the crust. Professional pizza ovens will easily reach 900 °F or 450 °C while a home oven will only reach 450 °F or 230 °C. These lower temperatures will allow the ingredients to separate and the fat will convert to grease and will leak out.
- Dab away. I hate to suggest this, but the last recourse is to simply let the pizza sit at a slight angle, allowing the oil or built-up moisture to drip off, or allowing it to pool in a convenient spot where it can just be dabbed away discreetly.
- Serve the pizza on a clean surface: Any grease that will have leaked out of the ingredients will be trapped on cooking surfaces such as a pizza pan. Moving the pizza off these surfaces allows some of the grease to drip away.
- Moving the pizza to a new surface also gives the pizza a chance to cool down a little, which will thicken the grease a bit, making it less visible.
- Use a thicker crust: in the end, the crust will absorb some of the grease, and the thicker the crust, the more it will absorb and the lesser the effect will be. By using a thicker crust, the amount of grease will see less visually and on your tastebuds.
Does Blotting Your Pizza Really Cut Calories?
As simple as it is, blotting away the grease, or tilting the pizza to allow the grease to run off the pizza will reduce the calories in your pizza. Science tells us that grease is pure fat and fat is very high in calories, thus the less grease we eat, the lower the calorie intake. Of course, some oil is not bad for us and higher fat content foods do make us feel fuller for longer, so perhaps controlling the amount of grease on a pizza is more important than being paranoid about it.
Nutritionists have estimated that a pepperoni pizza will easily have 324 calories and that 1 slice of this pizza can have up to 13 grams of fat… blotting can reduce this to 7 or 8 grams of fat.
What other toppings should I cut back on?
- Anchovies: these fish are naturally high in oil and are often stored in oil themselves, thus adding a lot of oil or grease to the pizza.
- Olives: Olives are packed with oil… after all, we make olive oil by squeezing olives. Reducing the number of olives or adding them after baking the pizza can reduce the visible grease on the pizza.
Is pizza grease really that bad for you?
Some would argue that pizza with its antioxidants from the tomatoes may not be so bad for you. However, a badly prepared pizza can be very high in grease and can also contain the wrong types of oils. Instead of unsaturated fats, often pizza grease is made from saturated fats, solid at room temperature but liquid when heated. These will lead to health issues and should be avoided at all costs.
- Digestive tract issues: a huge increase of grease will slow down the digestive tract and can cause bloating, nausea or discomfort.
- Acne: grease can cause hormonal imbalances which result in acne.
- Damages healthy gut bacteria: unsaturated fats will affect the bacterial balance in your gut, usually degrading the healthy bacteria population, which increases digestive issues.
