The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science

the first place.
Now, these were very poor scientists. Rule Numero Uno
when it comes to science is this: Be very precise about what
question you are trying to answer. The more limited the
scope of your question, the easier it will be to design an
experiment to answer it. There are approximately a gajillion
variables when it comes to pizza, each one of them
interesting in its own way. But here, I was interested in only
one: how does the water’s mineral content affect the dough?
What that meant was that in order to isolate that single
variable, I’d have to ensure that every single other variable
out of those gajillion remained exactly the same from
sample to sample. Easier said than done.
In the real world—particularly with cooking—there are an
insane amount of variables to try and control for. Perhaps
that log in the wood-burning oven is gonna burn slightly
hotter for pizza #2 than for pizza #1, raising the temperature
by a couple of degrees. Or maybe Mathieu will have to wait
for a server with a load of dishes to pass by before inserting
pizza #5 into the oven, adding a few seconds to its trip. This
is an inevitable, unavoidable reality when it comes to
science. What we can hope, however, is that these tiny
changes in method from sample to sample will make a
negligible difference compared to the variable we are
actually testing for. We can also do our best to make sure
every sample is treated the same.
I asked Mathieu to weigh the ingredients for each batch of
dough precisely and to ensure that each batch was kneaded
for the same length of time and allowed to ferment at the
same temperature. While normally the pizzaioli at the