There’s nothing like an amazing pizza fresh out of the oven, with its golden cheese, bubbling sauce, crisp crust and—most importantly—sizzling pepperoni. Pepperoni sausage has a satisfying, spicy flavor that adds a lot to a plain pie, and can also be an excellent accompaniment to a snack of cheese and crackers.
If you’ve ever chowed down on a delicious frozen pizza, you might wonder why pepperoni is so tasty. You might think of pepperoni as something that we buy pre-sliced in a bag, but it takes a lot of work to make that perfect bite, from the original meat to the final cured sausage. Read on for some of the key details about making pepperoni sausage:
- Lean and mean: Unlike some other sausages, pepperoni is lower in fat content, usually under 30 percent. This is true whether the sausage is made from beef, pork or a combination of beef and pork, which is usually heavier on the pork than the beef.
- Spiced to perfection: Pepperoni’s name has “pepper” in it, and this helps to indicate that it’s a spicier sausage than others, like salami. There are different blends of spices, but pepperoni often includes black pepper, cayenne pepper and paprika. It also often has some type of seeds for crunch and flavor, like cracked anise seeds or fennel seeds. These spice blends help to make pepperoni unique within the sausage world.
- Fermentation: Also called curing sausage, fermentation happens when the sugar included in sausage breaks down chemically and turns into acid. This helps to preserve the sausage and also improves its flavor.
- Maybe smoke it up: Though traditional pepperoni was not smoked, it’s still possible to add a smoking step while making pepperoni. An eight-hour cold smoke is all you need to enhance the flavor of the sausage.
- Give it time: Once the sausages are made, they need to sit for about six to eight weeks to dry out. During this time, the pepperoni sausage should shrink by about 30 percent.
Even though original Italian pizzas didn’t include pepperoni sausage, it’s since become a staple ingredient on this classic American comfort food. You may be looking for tasty frozen pizza, and if so, Giovanni’s Frozen Pizza is happy to serve you some of our excellent frozen products. We offer pizza with an especially thin crust, which means the pizza comes out of the oven only 30 percent crust and 70 percent toppings—a perfect venue for your trusty pepperoni! On top of this, we have crafted a unique and delectable sauce that will keep you coming back to our pizza time and again.
Since 1994, Giovanni’s Frozen Pizza has offered our delectable creations to people all over the northern United States. Our products are unbeatable in quality, but we still offer them to you at reasonable prices. Call today to find out more about how our frozen pizza stacks up against the competition—we’d love to tell you more about how our fresh ingredients and special recipes make such a difference!