I had written this up on my phone recently and the app crapped out before it posted.
Four dough, I tried something different and with spectacular results.
I tried a type of no knead method, that I read about on the seriouseats blog or whatever it is. I recently read the book "The Food Lab" by one of the senior bloggers over there and its a major revelation for me about food and cooking. At any rate....
For the pizza dough, I had normally used a recipe calculator that I found on
www.pizzamaking.com under the dough tools section I believe you can enter various parameters with suggested ranges given, in order to formulate a basic dough. This worked very well for me in the past. After reading the book and the blog I learned a few things about gluten formation that I hadn't known before. Taking the same basic recipe, and folks, be sure to omit any oil in your dough for maximum gluten formation, I tried the "no-knead" method.
In my stand mixer I placed the flour and water only. mixed only until fully incorporated, then left in mixer to rest for 45-90 minutes. Then I added salt and yeast (I use instant yeast) and again mix until uniformly incorporated, no more. Then let it rest for 90-120 minutes. At this point, I probably should have placed the whole mass into the fridge overnight then formed dough balls in the AM for PM pizza time, but instead I just formed the dough balls immediately and placed into the fridge for PM pizza the next day.
I also ran my oven at a lower temp and cooked for a longer time: normally I run about 650-725 degrees with about a 2-2.5 minute bake time, but this time I ran it 490-550 degrees and a 4.5-5 minute bake time. I took the dough out an hour before planned bake time to allow to warm to room temp. It was noticeably well risen and bubbly much more so than when I used 1% oil in the mix plus about a 15 minute mixer knead that I had been doing previously with good results. But this time, I was able to stretch the "skins" much thinner without tearing. I had much greater "oven spring" in the crust with excellent crumb formation. By cooking lower and longer I had no scorched flour or crust (and oddly, I had uncooked flour on bottom of some pieces! I must do better at getting this off for my next pizza night!) The baked pizza slices were thin crusted and rigid with no "floppy tip" that I've experienced in the past.
Overall, I was extremely happy with my first "no-knead" dough. Check out that method yourselves. I had read also that a three day "bulk ferment" (unballed dough mass) improved the flavor of the dough even more so than a 24 hour ferment.
I also encourage you all to check out the pizzamaking.com site. Lots of guys there put this thread to shame. One guy has a sourdough time-table for projecting the fermentation time based on temperature (and yeast percentage as well I believe.) Lots to be learned.
TD
