hard to find fault with any of them, but does #3 look just a
shade paler than the rest, indicating a lower-mineral-content
water? Could be. But if so, why isn’t it also more tender?
See, these are observations you can make relatively
empirically—that is, free from bias. Sure, eating the same
pizza when starving versus when stuffed will elicit two
different reactions, but by reducing each one to basic
elements that are more easily quantified—crispness,
chewiness, degree of charring—you can get a more accurate
picture of the pizza overall, divorcing it from the mental bias
of your current state of mind.
With the pizzas tasted, we thanked Mathieu for his
incredible pizza (the best in the city, for my money), and
bravely made our separate ways through the night, several
degrees more content and several pounds heavier.
Key to a Good Tasting #7: Analyze
Once all the tasting has been done and all the data collected,
it’s your job to analyze it in order to make the most
reasonable assessment you can about what factors are
affecting your variable. In the case of the pizzas, that meant
charting the data and listing it in order from lowest mineral
content (which should presumably deliver more more
tender, softer, less-sprung, paler dough) to highest. If
everything went according to theory, the lines for crispness,
toughness, and airiness should all show distinct trends,
going up or down as the mineral content of the water
increases.
As it turns out, no such trends existed. True, the two
batches made with Evian—the highest mineral content of all