GROUPON GUIDE TO COLUMBUS

Subway’s Flatizza Recalculates the Shape of Food

Jun 2, 2014
Subway’s Flatizza Recalculates the Shape of FoodWith the Flatizza, Subway’s culinary team has done the impossible: they’ve created a flat pizza. This new creation packs all of the classic pizza flavors—ripe tomatoes, melted mozzarella, and crispy carbs—into an astonishingly two-dimensional food item. Here at the Groupon Test Kitchen (GTK), we felt that this brave new Euclidean vision for pizza could be applied to other classic American foods as well. After lengthy brainstorming and prototyping, we created more pleasingly geometric versions of our favorite treats. Here are four highlights from our collection of hundreds of new products: Squarester Crackers subways-flatizza-recalculates-the-shape-of-food_crackers_600c390 Because of their tiny round shape, oyster crackers are notoriously difficult to top with cheese. Even pre-sliced cheese blocks designed for crackers drape hilariously over the edge, smothering the oyster crackers’ deliciously crunchy texture. Never again. Starting with pure oyster-cracker dough, we rolled out a thin sheet and cut it, not into abstract oyster shapes, but into large squares—perfectly sized for slices of cheese and salami. Cylindridogs subways-flatizza-recalculates-the-shape-of-food_hotdog_600c390 Hot dogs have never lived up to their shape potential. So we took everything that makes them wonderful—namely a lot of meaty animal parts—and pressed them into a sausage casing. The result was a dead-simple tubular food that’s both portable and easy to eat. One GTK chef noted that the tubular meat-food would fit neatly in a modified hamburger bun, if the bun could be somehow stretched along the x-axis. Although this may be impossible under our current understanding of Cartesian baking, who knows how future thought paradigms may influence the interdynamics of hot dogs and buns. Protein Oblongs subways-flatizza-recalculates-the-shape-of-food_egg_600c390 To alter eggs, we went straight to the source. After modifying a chicken-feed mix and piping audio from geometry lectures into chicken coops at night, our feathered friends finally produced perfectly oblong eggs. This shape proves to be both easy to hold and impossible to roll off the table and break on the floor. Toroidonuts subways-flatizza-recalculates-the-shape-of-food_donut_600c390 The best way to make food more appetizing is to introduce it to a new dimension. So when rethinking the donut, we interpolated an existing donut cross section around the z-axis with perfect radial symmetry. The resulting torus of fried dough can be hyper-stereographically projected from the fourth dimension to model the shape of the universe, with sprinkles representing galaxies and frosting representing dark matter. Yum!