In theory, we love bagel bites. They're so cute! They're like tiny pizzas! You can eat them anytime! But in reality, mini pizza bagels have flaws. Can we find a bagel bite to love? We tried three different brands to find out. More
You may remember the preliminary round of canned-tomato sampling that we did in September, in which we asked for input on tomato brands for Round 2. Well, here's Round 2. With a surprising winner.... More
In the interest of finding a great-tasting canned tomato for pizza-making, a small group of pizza and tomato enthusiasts taste-tested 16 different canned tomatoes. Though this tasting is not as scientifically rigorous as it might be, there were some interesting observations. High price is not predicative of good flavor. Second, the "DOP" tomatoes we tasted did not score very high at all. And the top two spots weren't even San Marzano tomatoes from Italy; instead, they were grown in California's Central Valley. More
"Sadly, frozen pizza will never develop that primordial ooze that truly good pizza has." [Photographs: Robyn Lee] Brings to mind... Dr. Oetker Frozen Pizza » Totino's Party Pizza as "Pizzarito" » Surreal '60s Pizza Roll Commercial » With so many frozen pizza brands claiming to use higher-quality ingredients and "new recipe formulas," aiming to taste like, well, not frozen pizza, we decided to cruise the freezer aisle and load up the shopping cart to see if any of them were actually decent. Not so surprisingly, this didn't win for most delicious and exciting taste test at Slice–Serious Eats headquarters. The... More
"There were definitely two winners, and two that would require a lot more beer-drinking." Clockwise from top left: Pizza Hut, Papa John's, Domino's, Little Caesars. [Photographs: Robyn Lee] Since pizza is right up there with wings and guacamole as far as Super Bowl cuisine goes, we ordered pepperoni pizzas from the four big nationwide chains (Little Caesars, Pizza Hut, Papa John's and Domino's) to find the tastiest. Why pepperoni? Because most people order pizza with at least one topping and pepperoni is the most popular one in the U.S.... More
It's time for another round of The Food Lab. Got a suggestion for an upcoming topic? Email Kenji here, and he'll do his best to answer your queries in a future post. [Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt] Just as the jocks like to stick together and nerds travel in packs, obsessives bordering on the psychotic (like me) seek out the acquaintance of others like themselves, in a manner that some say borders on the, well, the obsessive. The first time I heard that the mineral content of water might have an effect on the properties of bread dough was about eight... More
