Norma,
Thank you for running the test. That is good news and those are good numbers. The differences are most likely within the margin of error. If you repeat the experiment, you might reverse the two lids and average the two sets of numbers for each skin. But your results, and those of Bob as well, seem to confirm that the hydration values of the real MM dough and our clone MM doughs are about the same--around 50%. So, it looks like we have been on the money for some time. Now, if we can get a correct dough ball weight for the 10" pizza, that would be nice.
On the matter of a gluten test for you to consider, this afternoon I retrieved the MM clone dough that I had planned to discard and conducted a simple gluten test. I arbitrarily took a 5-ounce sample of the dough and washed it under a continuous stream of cold water. To be sure that I didn't lose any of the sample, I washed it over a flour sifting screen that I had placed over a container to collect the water. The screen was used to catch any of the gluten that might slip through my fingers (as it turned out, I was able to keep all of the gluten in my hands). I kneaded the dough under the cold stream of water and squeezed it as hard as I could to be sure that everything but the gluten was washed away. At the beginning, the liquids were white (from the starch in the dough) but after about 10 minutes, the water ran clear. What remained was a somewhat rubbery gluten mass. It was mushy and a light brown in color. Whether that is the natural color of gluten or colored by the molasses, I have no idea.
I dried the gluten mass on some paper towels (being careful so that the gluten wouldn't stick to the paper towels) for about a minute and then weighed it. The original piece of dough was about 142 grams; the gluten mass was around 53 grams. The percent of wet gluten was thus a bit over 37%. That seems to be in the ballpark for bread flour, although there can be differences from one flour lot to another and from one wheat cultivar to another. As the gluten mass dried more, the percent dropped by another couple percent. I know that this isn't the ideal test, given that the dough also contained yeast, salt, oil and molasses, but if one does a comparative test with two doughs with the same ingredients, the relative numbers should be instructive. Remember, also, that my dough ball had vital wheat gluten as well as the King Arthur bread flour. So, your test should be better than mine.
The above test was very easy to perform. So, if you are able to conduct similar tests on a sample of the MM dough and a like sample (by weight) of your MM clone dough, we might be able to compare the weights of the two gluten masses to determine whether MM is using a flour with a higher or lower protein content than the high-gluten flour that you used to make your MM clone dough. Was it KASL? If this test works, then it might be possible to conduct another gluten test (a baking test) to confirm the results of the first gluten test.
Peter
