If you'd like to eat the world's most scientifically perfect pizza, you have two options: One, fly to Rome and order a Margherita pizza fresh from the brick oven; or, two, solve a long thermodynamic equation to simulate that glorious Italian pizza in your pathetic electric oven at home. Because the heat conductivity of metal is significantly more powerful than that of brick, the bottom of your pizza will absorb heat much more quickly than the rest of the pie. If you are baking your pie in an electric oven, chances are your pizza is resting on a metal tray or baking rack. That's the basic premise of a new paper titled "The Physics of Baking Good Pizza," published earlier this year in the preprint journal arXiv.
– Not all scientific research takes place in labs. Just ask food anthropologist Sergio Grasso and physicists Andrey Varlamov and Andreas Glatz, who had the tough job of sampling Margherita pizzas across Rome in the lead up to their paper, "The Physics of Baking Good Pizza." The pizzaiolos of Italy have the process down pat, relying on curved brick ovens heated to 625 degrees Fahrenheit to perfectly bake the pie of tomato, mozzarella, and basil on all sides in two minutes, the authors found. They also learned duplicating this process in your standard electric oven would turn a pizza to "coal" since metal conducts heat much better than brick, reports Live Science. There is a solution, however. Per Particle, the authors developed a mathematical formula to show how a pizza could be baked to near-perfection in an electric oven. They recommend baking a pie at 450 degrees Fahrenheit for 170 seconds, or slightly longer if the chosen toppings have a high water content "as the pizza will return more heat to the oven via evaporation," per Live Science. Broiling the top at this point would work, too, per Reader's Digest. While you may not get the even cook of a brick oven—if necessary, pizzaiolos lift the pizza base from the oven while allowing the toppings to continue cooking with radiant heat for about 30 seconds—the pie should be similar to Rome's pizza, the authors say. (Just don't substitute the mozzarella.)