Just had a customer ask me if I’ve ever tried spraying my cheese with water before cooking. Anybody heard of this?
I guess it prevents the cheese from browning and makes it look the pizzas in tv commercials? I don’t think plain cheese should get too brown unless you’re using the wrong cheese or overcooking them. I do notice that plain cheese pizzas brown more than pizzas with toppings but I’ve never heard of anybody spraying them first. Is this a real thing?
I just cook Cheese pizzas less. Push them in a bit to cut off about 30 seconds of bake time.
Yes it is the “real deal”, it can and is done to help control color development on the cheese in deck ovens (it doesn’t work in air impingement ovens). One of the reasons why cheese doesn’t get as much color when other toppings are added, especially if those toppings include vegetable or fungi toppings, is because these toppings are for the most part about 90% water and they give off a portion of that water during the baking process. The moisture laden water is cooler than the dry air in the oven so it blankets the pizza in a cover of cooler, moist air which helps to reduce the browning of the cheese (Physics #101). Again this doesn’t apply to air impingement ovens as the high velocity airflow in these ovens is designed to remove this blanketing layer of cooler air from the product zone of the oven resulting in a faster bake. One other trick that we have used to control the way the cheese melts and browns is to use either diced cheese for less color or shredded for more color and add it frozen for even more controlled melt and color development.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor