Reddit Is Losing It Over This 'Unburnt Pizza' Hack

We get it: A blackened crust means the pizza is artisanal, and the restaurant can charge a lot more money for it. As Amateur Gourmet advises, don't call it burned — it's charred! Serious Eats tried to draw a distinction that might still be lost on people who like their pizza crust a mild shade of brown: A char adds texture and flavor and only crosses over to burned if the crust tastes acrid.

If you're still not buying into the charred pizza craze, then you might find a 30-second video recently posted to Reddit to be highly satisfying. Redditor AnneGeit went on the otherwise serious ZeroWaste subreddit ("responsible citizens who try to minimize our overall environmental impact") to post a decidedly unserious video of a man using a grinder to take a layer of black crust off the bottom of his homemade pizza. (Even the most stubborn pizza snob would have to admit — that was burned.) "Better than throwing it out," AnneGeit wrote in their caption.

The grinder did a fantastic job removing the burned bottom of the pizza on that Reddit post, leaving a highly edible-looking finished product. Many of the serious-minded members of the ZeroWaste subreddit community didn't like what they saw, however. Some worried that the person with the grinder wasn't wearing protective equipment. "Isn't the charring aspect of burning carcinogenic? Vaporizing it like this inside without a mask is probably wildly unhealthy," Diabetous commented. "Cheese grater can do the same thing without adding heavy metals and pathogens from the workshop," Stenchosaur said.

Another Debbie Downer chimed in: "There is no such thing as food grade blade for an angle grinder. Who knows if he even used a new one or just wiped off the bits of metal from the one that was already in the tool." Other commenters showed they were in on the joke. "Hit that with a quick glossy shellac and dinner is served," netwolf420 quipped. StrangerOnTheReddit commented, "I really want Gordon Ramsay to see this."

That's a good idea. Maybe he can show it to some of those fancy artisanal pizzerias, too.