MADISON – It’s quiet as a group of eight people stand bent at the waist, intently staring at a pizza sitting on a gleaming stainless-steel counter.
It’s an early March Wednesday morning, and they are in the Hilmar Cheese Dairy Applications Lab of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Dairy Research.
They occasionally look up from the pizza to glance at a poster-sized chart propped on an easel at one end of the counter. It’s labeled “Surface Characteristics.” There are two rows of pizza pictures on this chart, ranging from raw to overdone and brown. One of the rows is marked “Blister Quantity,” the other is “Blister Color,” and there are a range of numbers representing the gradients.
After a period of hyper-focused attention, the group of people straighten up and make notations on paper or a tablet.
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