Cup and Char Pepperoni – Thursday Night time Pizza

Printed Jan 3, 2024 · Modified Jan 3, 2024

Wish to make restaurant-quality cup and char pepperoni pizza at dwelling? On this put up, you will study which kind of pepperoni works finest, what makes it curl, and the way to get essentially the most scrumptious leads to a typical oven.

What Precisely is Cup and Char Pepperoni?

Effectively, it is precisely what it appears like: pepperoni that curls up into cups and chars across the edges when it is heated. Regardless of what varied firms need you to imagine, you wouldn’t have to purchase a product labeled “cup and char” with the intention to get ‘roni cup outcomes. In reality, labels will do you little to no good normally, because the several types of pepperoni are not often labeled as such.

If you need pepperoni to cup up in your do-it-yourself pizza because it bakes, you should select the best-quality stick pepperoni yow will discover and minimize it into skinny (however not too skinny) slices with a pointy chef’s knife.

Nonetheless undecided what I imply? This is what to search for when shopping for pepperoni for a cup and char pizza:

1. Don’t purchase the super-thin pre-sliced pepperoni that is often displayed within the deli part of your grocery retailer. Although scrumptious in its personal proper, one of these pepperoni will lay flat (or curl just a bit) when it is baked on a pizza.
2. Select a stick of pepperoni that’s brick-red in shade, exhausting, and lumpy on the skin. These are the traits of what’s generally known as “outdated world” or artisan pepperoni, which is the most effective cupping choice due to its pure or collagen casing and smaller circumference.
3. Reduce the pepperoni your self into thin-ish slices. Pizza guru J. Kenji López-Alt recommends a thickness between .1 inch (2.5 mm) and .225 (5.6 mm), however I’ve had the most effective outcomes with slices which are roughly ⅛ inch (3.2 mm) thick.

Experiment Time: Does it Matter How You Bake the Pizza?

Out of curiosity (and since Lopez-Alt left this out of his personal cup and char pepperoni examine for Critical Eats), I performed an experiment to see whether or not pepperoni slices cup up otherwise relying on how a pizza is baked. I used the identical three varieties of pepperoni (pre-sliced, American-style stick pepperoni, and “old-world” stick pepperoni) for every of two pizzas, in addition to the identical sauce, cheese, and dough. I baked one of many pizzas on a pizza pan at 500°F. Then, I preheated my baking stone to 550°F for an hour, switched to Broil on excessive, and baked the opposite one straight on the stone.

Take a look at #1: Can I get pepperoni cups on a pizza pan?

This was a nice shock. The high-quality (“old-world”/artisan) pepperoni cupped up properly on the pan pizza, and the American-style stick pepperoni curled up just a bit on the edges.

Take a look at #2: Will all three varieties of pepperoni cup up on a high-heat baking stone pizza?

Since I would already made plenty of cup and char pepperoni pizzas on my baking stone, I knew this technique would produce scrumptious “outdated world” ‘roni cups. What stunned me was the efficiency of the American-style variations.

Whereas the artisanal pepperoni slices cupped up gorgeously, as anticipated, they weren’t alone. The sliced-by-hand American-style stick pepperoni curled nearly into cups, too, and even the bigger pre-sliced model baked into shallow bowls.

Conclusion

If you need the most effective cup and char pepperoni, get the good things and slice it by hand to a uniform ⅛-inch thickness (or barely thinner). The roni cups might be barely extra outlined in case you bake them on the highest warmth on a baking stone, however they can even curl up properly on a pizza pan or baking sheet at 500°F.

FAQs

Associated