Potassium bromate is not a suspected carcinogen. It’s is a proven carcinogen. It oxidizes DNA.
NEW YORK — After more than a decade of mixing and kneading dough in his family’s Brooklyn pizzeria, Salvatore Lo Duca recently made a distressing discovery: A key component of their thin-crust pies, bromated flour, contained a suspected carcinogen already banned in much of the world.
So, in the back kitchen of Lo Duca Pizza, the 39-year-old began tweaking the original recipe handed down by his parents — with unexpected results.
“When we started playing around with a different flour, I actually took a liking to it,” said Lo Duco, who runs the shop with his five brothers. “It’s a little more expensive, but the quality is there.”
A looming ban on the additive, potassium bromate, may soon force thousands of pizzerias and bagel shops across New York into a similar transition.
…the oxidizing agent, which reduces rest time for dough and helps ensure a stronger, chewier product.
a suspected carcinogen already banned in much of the world.
Yet another example of the USA being so far behind the rest of the world in consumer safety.
Why is he tweaking the recipe on his own while franchises located in the rest of the world have used alternatives for decades? Potassium bromide has been banned in Europe for 36 years as it causes dna damage and tumors in animals.
New York pizza culture is deeply personal to all involved. The idea of using someone else’s recipe would be repugnant.
People putting culture over health will always be silly to me. The fact that we find out we did it wrong the entire time is a possibility for progress.
We used to smoke cigarettes with asbestos filters, for fucks sake.
I put culture over health every time I make bacon.
Or Christmas cookies
It’s not just culture, it’s artistry. The ability to for a small restaurant to consistently turn out a product that has the same flavor, consistency, texture, and high standard customers have come to expect is not easy task. You have to make sure your supply line is consistent as well as make sure your employees are trained on prep/finish.
Corporate places like McDonalds achieve consistency by serving you food that’s so processed it requires no effort to taste exactly the same across time zones. Changing your base ingredients is going to alter your outcome from the beginning, so it’s on the chef to figure out how to amend their recipe with new ingredients yet not alter the final product. It’s a welcome challenge for those who have a passion for cooking.
Copying someone else’s recipe would be like suggesting to Picasso “why not just paint like Rembrandt” if he lost access to his normal brushes.
I would agree but will remind you that we once used paints with lead and arsenic mixed in. Van Gogh used those paints, but we do not longer use them, because they kill you. It’s incredibly silly to keep using 19th century tecniques that we now know cause cancer, because we think using them makes us a better painter (it does not).
The comparison is not about ceasing to use the dangerous product (be it a food or paint additive), it’s that the additive was doing something in the original product and that the artist must now find a way to replicate the work by substituting a safer ingredient. Painters aren’t even the greatest example because someone like Picasso doesn’t paint the exact same painting day in and day out for different customers, he’s more like a chef that specializes in his signature style cuisine. Each meal might be different, but it’s got the same “pizazz”.
Pizzarias can live or die on one product, and a major component of that product is the crust. If your crust is one of the most important at aspects of your pizza, changing flour brands is a nightmare. Culinary expertise is an art, but baking is a science. Your diehards are going to notice the change. Hopefully a bit of education (we’re changing recipes because the ingredient is unsafe) gets them to cut you a little slack, but they’ll also love it if you take the time to figure out how to keep delivering what they fell in love with.
My experience with taste, as a sommelier, is that the regular customer is not really good at discerning tastes. They are good at rehashing what thinks ought to be, though.
For instance the pasta carbonara is a wild ride from a reasonably flexible original idea with parsley and pancetta, to ideologues who say only five ingredients make a carbonara.
Even though the pasta carbonara is really recent in history, people make it up to be the biggest deal in culinary history.
Most carbonara recipe are great, most people wouldn’t take the difference. But most people do somehow cling to weird standards
But that still doesn’t change they want to tweak their recipe vs copying someone else’s , that’s the fun part for a lit of people that make food is coming up with things yourself
Sadly most places aren’t doing anything worth writing home about, but if this family actually cares then you’re very right and they need to learn exactly how the new ingredient will work in their kitchen.
In my experience bromated flour makes dough that I don’t like at all, so I’ll be glad when that’s gone.
New York pizza culture is a cult. Tired of people acting like it’s something handed down by a God. NY style pizza is honestly pretty mid in the grand scheme. It’s a generic American pizza style originally created in the early 1900s and largely became popular because it was affordable leading into and coming out of The Great Depression.
Clearly not a NYer. NY pizza culture goes beyond the pizza itself, though I will also strongly disagree that it’s mid- them’s fighting words. It’s a result of NYC’s crazy lifestyle. It is:
- Absolutely everywhere and open late (one of my favorite memories is getting drunk pizza at 4am with a bunch of randos I befriended at Stonewall)
- Often times cheaper than anything around them
- Large enough to fold in half and eat with one hand while running to catch the train
- Perfectly crisped with just the right amount of burnt crust, fresh tomato sauce, and melty cheese
- Free parm
- Like the other person said, chefs take their recipes deeply personally
I no longer live in NYC sadly but it’s my home city and the pizza culture is honestly one of the things I miss most. That’s not to say other cities don’t have good pizza (shout-out to Detroit style) but they lack the other elements of that culture. Tangentially related, wtf is going on with Pittsburgh style pizza?
Edit: I didn’t feel like I needed to specify but toppings are a huuuge part of it
Okay and altering the recipe to remove potassium bromate will change exactly zero of those things.
I never argued that it would
if it was perfectly crisped, you wouldn’t be able to fold it in half.
NYC-style pizza has one thing going for it: it’s genuine fast food. It’s on par with other fast food.
Clearly not a NYer. You’re right. And thank god. Couldn’t stand it if nearly everyone in my city considered a type of food as part of their core identity.
Absolutely everywhere and open late (one of my favorite memories is getting drunk pizza at 4am with a bunch of randos I befriended at Stonewall) Not actually pizza-related at all. There are tons of places open late, especially in large cities.
Often times cheaper than anything around them Not pizza related either, food pricing is largely based on supply and demand. It’s generally cheap because there’s lots of competition nearby.
Large enough to fold in half and eat with one hand while running to catch the train Can’t think of a single time I’ve needed to do anything similar to that. NY is filled with people that can’t time manage apparently.
Perfectly crisped with just the right amount of burnt crust, fresh tomato sauce, and melty cheese You’re describing a pizza.
Free parm I have literally never had a pizza place charge for parm anywhere I’ve ever been nationwide.
Like the other person said, chefs take their recipes deeply personally That’s just a chef thing. Nothing to do with pizza specifically.
Tangentially related, wtf is going on with Pittsburgh style pizza? Pittsburgh style isn’t too crazy to be honest. It’s a far cry from NY style, but so is most other styles of pizza. Why is there so much insistence on just cheese in NY? Live a little and get some toppings on there.
Have you even seen Altoona-style pizza? Made widely famous thanks to it being where Luigi was arrested. Sicilian-style pizza dough, tomato sauce, green bell pepper, salami, topped with American cheese and cut into squares. That’s an abomination.
That style of food you don’t care for is a style that other people grew up with and think of as “the good old days.” There are food styles you do like that exist in precisely the reverse situation. That’s all perfectly normal.
Damn man, sounds like you’re just a hater. “Pretty mid” are you judging an entire city of pizza based on one interaction you’ve had? There are multiple types of pizza within just NY, you can’t tell me a slice in the Bronx and in Brooklyn are the same.
Yes, not every 99c pizza (where you can find em still, increasingly $1.50 min) is going to be mind boggling, but the standard is significantly higher than the rest of the states and any country outside of Italy. I can walk into damn near any joint in the city and walk out with acceptable pizza, something you absolutely cannot say about the rest of America. There’s a reason pizza hut and dominoes and the rest of that garbage don’t do well here, but seemingly have a hold everywhere else.
Then, when you’re ready to start finding the best? Takes slightly more work but that’s here too, usually a little bit more expensive than the 99c places but your history lessons aren’t going to tell you where to find it lmao like that has anything to do with pizza quality a century later in a city like NY.
Man you’re making me miss a slice of Joe N John’s. I used to live around the corner from them, it was dangerous
you don’t like grease with a side of pizza?
To find a recipe that he likes? Lots of ways to make dough.
I had no idea what this was… Apparently it’s been banned in Canada since 1994.
It’s the reason why reservoirs are covered with black plastic balls.
I’ve been avoiding bromated flour in my household for years and I was really surprised to learn that any sort of bakery was still using it in the 21st century.
King Arthur Flour doesn’t use bromate, and, not surprisingly, has a position on the question. But they are fair about the advantages, too:
Potassium bromate, commonly referred to as simply “bromate,” is a slow-acting oxidizer, contributing its functionality throughout the mixing, fermentation and proofing stages, with important residual action during the early stages of baking. Azodicarbonamide (ADA), potassium and calcium iodate, and calcium peroxide are rapid-acting oxidizers, while ascorbic acid (vitamin C) works at intermediate rates, but all release their activity in mixing and proofing. Bromate, when applied within the prescribed limits (15-30ppm), is completely used up during the bake leaving no trace in the finished product.
This shouldn’t be called a ban. This should be called the Great Beautiful Clean Healthy Pizza Law.
Pineapple?
