Marty,
LOL. There's plenty that I don't know. That's why I selected "always learning" as my tag line and why I hang around the forum. The moment I think I know everything is when I don't know anything.
I wish I could tell you that I always enjoyed success with my pizza making. But, like many, I suffered my share of failures. I decided about a year or two before joining the forum to remedy that situation by learning as much as I could about pizza making--from books, endless searches on bread and pizza making on the internet, and from people like Tom Lehmann, whose many writings I read and reread and reread until I thought I understood what he was saying. And I also paid close attention to what our professional baker members said, like DINKS, Trinity and bakerboy, and on the Neapolitan side, what pizzanapoletana (Marco) said. Now we are fortunate to have Evelyne Slomon to teach us even more. I am sure that it helped that I have a technical background (although not in chemistry) and that I and am hard wired to rely on facts, evidence, detail, and cause and effect, rather than guessing and speculation. I also like working with numbers.
Now, back to your questions about the eggs and oil.
For eggs, I use the numbers that member DINKS provided in this post:
http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,2563.msg22215.html#msg22215 (Reply 5). So, if we assume that the contents of a standard large egg weighs 1.80 ounces, and you want to use 5% eggs for 25 pounds of flour, that comes to 0.05 x 25 x 16 = 20 ounces of eggs. At 1.80 ounces per egg, that comes to 20/1.80 = 11.11 eggs, or just shy of a dozen eggs. If you want greater accuracy, I would actually weigh the contents of one of your eggs and divide that number into 20 ounces. As pointed out in DINKS post, an egg can vary in weight based on age. Also, I have discovered that eggs vary from one supplier to another even when graded the same.
As for the oil, it can be used to produce two different types of crispiness. If you use a fair amount, the crust can have a tender, crispy character. When none is used, or very little, the crust can have a hard, crispy character, much like what one gets in making a classic French baguette that uses no oil and no sugar. I believe what Waz was looking for based on his expertise eating Donatos pizzas is a tender, crispy character with a center that is similar to an English muffin, by his description. The way I arrived at 3.5% oil was pretty straightforward. In the Donatos ingredients list, the oil falls in between the eggs and salt in the overall pecking order. Since we decided that eggs would represent about 8-10% by weight of flour, and since 1.7% is typical for salt, that meant that the oil would be less than 8-10% but more than 1.7%. So, to achieve the tender/crispy effect that Waz was looking for, I elected to use 3.5%.
Another factor to consider about crispiness is the character of the dough skin just prior to baking. To get increased crispiness, it is better to have a rather porous skin such that it acts as a insulator barrier to heat transfer through the pizza, allowing more time for the heat of the oven to drive off more moisture from the skin and produce a drier, more crispy crust. In the Donatos dough clone, the proofing of the skin creates a more porous structure. So, as long as the oven temperature and bake time are properly selected, the finished crust should have both the tender and crispy characteristics. At least that's the theory I am operating under.
Peter
