Pizza, microwaved

Microwave flavor generation 1s an area which has not yet received much attention. It is estimated that microwave oven penetration in US households 1s now approximately 75X. A few years ago, food processors simply added microwave instructions to their regular line of products. More recently, microwave specific products have arrived and include popcorn, pizza, cake and brownie mixes, stuffing mixes, and main meals. Major food processors will continue to design... 

Over the past few years, many advances have been made in the area of microwave product development with items such as popcorn, pizza, and frozen entrees. However, products such as baked goods have met with limited success. To date, many of the texture-related problems have been solved, but the majority of flavor-related problems (particularly flavor development during baking) have not. 

Paquet, A., Kalab. M. 1988. Amino acid composition and structure of cheese baked as a pizza ingredient in conventional and microwave ovens. Food Microstruc. 7, 93-103. 

So if your goal is to defeat the physics of phase change, imitation mozzarella is the way to go. But not if you want to preserve the wonderful aroma. The chemistry is just not the same. Unfortunately, our many experiences with processed cheese have led to an expectation of robustness in our pizza that will not be there if the pizza is made of unprocessed ingredients. So if you invest in a really good pizza, and there is enough left over to store, you may want to do so cautiously. Treated respectfully, true mozzarella may fair just fine frozen pizza should be thawed before reheating, and it should be reheated on low in the microwave, or perhaps better yet, in a warm oven. But even with these precautions, there may be changes in the texture and taste. So the best... 

While cyclic oligomers of PET-S (up to 7.0 g/kg) are found in a number of microwaveable PET-S food packages (i.e., those for Erench fries, popcorn, fish sticks, waffles, and pizza) [49]). 

In this context, another polymeric material that has (and is) been used in packaging should also be cited. This material is the paper , which is made of natural polymer (not a plastic) cellulose, which is an inert chemical. Although paper is inert, it is still claimed that the coating on the paper used to give grease resistance to microwave popcorn bags, fast food and candy wrappers, as well as in pizza box liners, can leach out certain toxic chemicals to the food in contact with it. When ingested (with the food), these chemicals are shown to break down into perfluoro-octanic acid, a chemical that an EPA expert... 

Moisture loss below freezable water range was mainly responsible, according to Vittadini et al. [145], for the thermomechanical behaviour of prebaked pizza dough reheated with a microwave oven as detected with DMA in three-point bending mode. Thermal transitions were associated to pizza texture characteristics thermograms presented two transitions a transition was detected at 60 40°C and was found responsible for the leathery texture in microwaved pizza, while the one detected at 0 30 °C was the dominating transition in the soft pizza reheated by conventional oven. 

---