I didn’t try to isolate part of the crust to taste, but I didn’t think it was as favorable as the crusts I have been making on this thread. I tried to taste the Buddy’s pizza little by little and tried to savor each bite. I sure don’t know if not a lot of flavor in the crust was because of the crust being half-baked or not. The cardboard liner that was under the half baked Buddy’s pizza was greasy though. I had thought about how I could try to tell what that oil was that Buddy’s used, but thought there was no way I was going to figure that out. I did try to rub my finger over the cardboard and taste it, but there was no taste. Also, I would believe Buddy’s crust would taste better right out of the oven at Buddy’s because of it partly frying in the steel pan.
Steve did post though in Reply 553 http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,21559.msg225660.html#msg225660 that he isolated a part of the crust on the Buddy’s pizza and found it not to have much flavor at all.
I am curious why you asked. Is that a reason for asking if Steve and I could taste the salt in the crust?
Norma,
I intentionally did not tell you why I was asking about the salt in the Buddy's crust because I did not want to bias your response or Steve's response. However, yesterday I went back to the Buddy's Nutrition data at
http://www.buddyspizza.com/nutrition.asp?Category=3 to do a sodium analysis. All I was looking for was to see if I could get an idea as to whether Buddy's uses a lot of salt or a little salt in its dough used to make the basic square pizzas. For my analysis, I looked for the smallest and simplest component of a Buddy's pizza. That component is a single slice of a Buddy's square cheese pizza.
If you look at the Buddy's Nutrition data, you will see that a single slice of a Buddy's square cheese pizza contains 403 mg of sodium. To put that number into perspective, it is equivalent to 0.173 teaspoons of salt. For a full 4-square pizza with four slices, the total sodium content would be 1612 mg. That is equivalent to 0.693 teaspoons of salt. That would be for all sources of sodium: the brick cheese, the sauce, the flour and the dough. To do another comparison, a slice of a Papa John's cheese pizza with a surface area similar to that of a single slice of Buddy's cheese pizza has 720 mg of sodium. So, if the Buddy's Nutrition data is to be believed, there is not a lot of salt in a Buddy's cheese pizza and quite possibly little or none in the crust if the following analysis is anywhere near correct.
You will recall that we were told by Buddy's (see Reply 470 at
http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,3783.msg220496.html#msg220496) that it uses approximately 2 ounces of brick cheese for each slice. Elsewhere, we read that Buddy's uses 15 ounces ("almost 1 lb", according to Buddy's) for its larger 8-square pizza. If we extrapolate that amount of cheese to a single slice, it is 1.875 ounces of brick cheese. Brick cheeses can contain varying amounts of sodium, through the addition of varying amounts of salt. For the Foremost brick cheese, for 1.875 ounces, the amount of sodium is 1.875 x 180 = 337.5 mg. According to the Nutrition Facts for the Eddie's brick cheese that you used and presented at Reply 72 at
http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,21559.msg220464.html#msg220464, the corresponding amount of sodium would be 1.875 x 160 = 300 mg. That is in line with a generic brick cheese as noted at the SelfNutritionData website at
http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/dairy-and-egg-products/4/2.
The next step of the analysis is to examine the sodium content for the Buddy's sauce. If Buddy's is still using Stanislaus tomato products, and if we assume that a single slice of a Buddy's cheese pizza uses one ounce of sauce, the amount of sodium (in the form of salt added to the tomatoes) for that one ounce of sauce might range from 60-75 mg for the types of Stanislaus tomato products that we believe Buddy's may be using. However, if Buddy's is using a Stanislaus tomato paste, like the one at
http://www.stanislausfoodproducts.com/_pdfs/Full-Red-Tomato-Paste.pdf, the sodium levels could be considerably less, especially once water is added. I might add here that the sauce analysis does not assume that more salt is added to the tomato products than what is already present in the cans of the tomato products themselves. Of course, if we assume that one slice of a Buddy's cheese pizza has more than one ounce of sauce on it, then the sodium number attributable to the sauce will increase accordingly. But, as will be evident below, the use of more sauce is not likely to move the sodium needle much.
The final step of the analysis is to examine the sodium content of the flour. For the Occident flour that you have been using, and the amount you have been using, I would estimate that the sodium content for the flour is about 3.3 mg. As you can see, it is quite small in relation to the other ingredients.
Now, if we start subtracting the sodium contents of the cheese, sauce and flour at the one-slice level from the 403 mg number given in the Buddy's Nutrition data, using just about any combination of the individual numbers I have given above, we end up with a minuscule amount of sodium that would be present in the dough at the one-slice level. If we then multiply the final sodium content for one slice by four to get to a full 4-square pizza, the amount of sodium when converted to salt is still minuscule. It might be no more than around 1/8 teaspoon. To be clear, that is for the entire dough ball used to make a 4-square pizza, no matter the actual weight of the dough ball.
So, unless my calculations are seriously wrong or flawed in some way, or else the Buddy's Nutrition data on the sodium is way off, my calculations suggest that there may no salt in the Buddy's dough. At first blush, that might come as a shock to some but we know that there are commercial pizza doughs that contain no salt, including, for example, the Malnati's and Gino's East deep dish doughs. In our case, we have always "assumed" that the Buddy's dough contains salt. This morning I did some more research to see if salt was specifically mentioned by Buddy's anywhere as being used in their dough and I came up empty. All that Buddy's has said is that it uses no sugar or oil in its dough. Since Buddy's often touts the health aspects of its pizzas, I might have thought that it would emphasize a low sodium content of its crust if such were true but I found no such claim. But, then again, I never saw such a claim from Malnati's or Gino's East about their crusts either.
At this point, perhaps the best way to test whether my analysis is correct is to make a Buddy's clone dough without any salt and taste the finished crust.
Peter
