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[Boy Hits Car]

Today, the final dough calculating tool—at least for the time being—has been added to the suite of dough calculating tools developed by Peter and I. This tool is called the Expanded Dough Calculating Tool, and is available at http://www.pizzamaking.com/dough_tools.html (Hit refresh if you don't see it listed).

It is most like the Lehmann dough calculating tool but with a much broader and diverse selection of ingredients to chose from. Whereas the Lehmann tool has a total of six possible ingredients--flour, water, yeast, salt, oil and sugar (optional)--the Expanded Dough Calculating Tool has a total of around 35 other ingredients to choose from. Obviously, no single dough formulation is likely to use many of those ingredients and, in fact, in most cases, it will be unlikely that one will use more than two or three ingredients beyond the basic six ingredients mentioned above. But, by offering such a diversity of ingredients, users will be able to use the tool with a very wide range of existing and new dough formulations.

Notably, the tool is not intended to be used for preferment or deep-dish dough formulations. For those applications, users should see the Preferment and Deep-Dish dough calculating tools that were developed for those specific applications. But apart from these two exceptions, the tool should work with all other styles, including New York, American, Sicilian, Neapolitan (commercial yeast versions), cracker, thick, California, etc.

As with the prior tools, it is intended that the new tool be used with proven dough formulations with workable sets of baker’s percents. But, because of the diversity of choices available to use, there is a great opportunity to experiment and come up with new and improved dough formulations. The risk is that users may try to use too many ingredients beyond the basic five or six, or use incorrect quantities, and, in the process, create what may appear to be a workable dough formulation on paper, but be unworkable in practice. The tool can’t tell the difference. It will produce outputs based on the inputs provided, whether correct or incorrect.

The following are the features of the new tool, many of which will already be familiar to our members based on the tools that preceded the new Expanded Dough Calculating Tool.

Thickness Factor and Dough Weight Options. As with earlier tools, the new tool gives users two options by which the ingredients and their quantities can be specified—the Thickness Factor option and the Dough Weight option. To use the Thickness Factor option, the user enters a known thickness factor (TF), a set of baker’s percents, the pizza size (diameter), and the desired number of pizzas (up to 999). With this option, the user can also choose the pizza shape, from either round or rectangular. The rectangular selection will be particularly useful to those who want to make Sicilian or “grandma” style pizzas, or even the Buddy’s rectangular/square deep-dish style as is popular in the Detroit area. In selecting the rectangular option, the user will be prompted to enter the dimensions (length and width) of the pizza (or the rectangular pan to be used).

To use the Dough Weight option, the user enters a starting dough weight, a set of baker’s percents, and the desired number of dough balls (up to 999). The dough ball weight can be specified in either grams or ounces. There is no need with this option to enter a thickness factor.

In each case, the user selects specific ingredients from the ingredients list that are used in addition to the standard ingredients of flour, water, yeast and salt, and the Enhanced Dough Calculating tool produces a set of data (ingredients and quantities) corresponding to all of the data entered into the tool.

Bowl Residue Feature. As with prior tools, the Expanded Dough Calculating Tool allows users to increase the quantities of the dough ingredients to compensate for minor losses of dough that can occur during preparation (due to flour, water and dough sticking to bowls, implements, fingers, work surfaces, etc.). This is done by specifying a particular percent increase. That percent will vary from case to case, but unless one is making a very wet and sticky dough it will usually be less than 4%. It is anticipated that users will determine the best percent to use in any given situation based on experience. If the finished dough exceeds the desired final dough weight, those with scales can always trim the final finished dough of the excess.

It will be noted that when the Thickness Factor method is used, the “final” thickness factor reflecting the bowl residue amount will appear in the data section, and also in a printout of the results produced by the Expanded Dough Calculating Tool tool. To preserve all of the data, including the initial thickness factor before compensation, it is strongly recommended that users print out a copy of the completed page, using the “Print” button provided for this purpose.

Expanded Data Fields. Also as with prior tools, the Expanded Dough Calculating tool has expanded data fields for several of the boxes into which values are entered so that users can enter numbers with several decimal places. This should allow for increased precision and fine-tuning of the results produced by the tool, particularly for those who convert existing recipes to baker’s percents and calculate thickness factors and the like and end up with numbers with several decimal places. It will be noted that if a user fails to enter a number into a box as required, that is, the entry box is left completely blank, the failure to enter a number (even a 0) will cause the error expression “NaN” to appear in the data section.

Copy Feature. A Copy “button” included in the tool allows allow users to copy information from the textual data section into posts or some other document, such as a Word document that might be used to compose replies to be posted on the forum. The information copied can be entered directly into the posts or other documents, by using a menu “paste” command or a “Control + V” keyboard command. Using the Copy button ensures that all of the data line up, thereby eliminating the need to do corrective “realignment” work when previewing replies to be posted on the forum.

Ingredients. As indicated above, the new tool has an extensive listing of ingredients that are commonly used in dough formulations. As will be noted, there are several groupings of ingredients, including oils, sugars (dry and liquid), solid fats, milk-based and other dairy products, chemical leavening systems and ingredients (including WRISE), grain-based products, and specialty ingredients like diastatic malt (Bob’s Red Mill brand) and PZ-44 (a dough relaxer). In a few cases, percentage ranges have been given to deter users from using excessive amounts which could result in unworkable or poor performing formulations.

An important consideration to bear in mind is that if the tool is used for dough design purposes, as by modifying an existing dough formulation by adding or substituting ingredients, it may be necessary or desirable to alter the hydration percentage to reflect those changes. For example, if wet ingredients are added, or substituted for dry ingredients, it will usually be necessary to decrease the formula hydration percent in the original formulation to compensate for the water content of the wet ingredients. Conversely, if dry ingredients are added, or substituted for wet ingredients, it will usually be necessary to increase the formula hydration percent to make up for the loss of water in the original formulation. To achieve accurate results, it will be necessary to calculate the amount of water added or taken away from a formulation by each change and adjust the hydration percent accordingly.

I hope the tool proves useful and, as usual, I welcome feedback and comments from our members.

- Mike

[Pete-zza]

When the latest dough calculating tool was being developed, Mike and I used to refer to it as the “kitchen sink” tool because it included so many different ingredients for users to choose from. We looked at a lot of different dough formulations to create the list of ingredients with the hope that we captured the most important ones. Yet, it is still possible that we missed a few and, hence, welcome suggestions from our members for other ingredients that might be added to the list. There may be some space limitations but it may be possible to substitute new ingredients for some that maybe don’t really have to be on the list as it now stands. But, finally, we have a tool that can handle simple ingredients like honey that are used in several of Randy’s pizza styles, including a few of my own that were inspired by Randy’s work on the forum. We can now also handle doughs with eggs, like the Donatos dough formulation, and others that use dried dairy whey, vital wheat gluten, and dried milk, to name some of the more obvious examples.

Of all the dough calculating tools now on the forum, the Expanded tool is perhaps potentially the most dangerous. That is because some people will use the tool to create new formulations based on their own imagination, creativity and experience, rather than using the tool with known workable formulations. Also, members may change existing formulations and not adequately take into account other changes that have to be made in concert with the new changes, such as discussed in Mike’s introductory post on the new tool. In order to be able to have a versatile tool from an ingredients standpoint, these were risks that we decided to accept. In any event, the worse that is likely to happen is that a dough ball will end up not working. At best, someone might come up with a dynamite new dough formulation, just as several people appear to have done using the Lehmann dough calculator.

Some ingredients were intentionally left off of the ingredients list. Some were just too exotic or only rarely used or were covered elsewhere, like yellow food coloring used with the deep-dish style. Beer was left off of the list, at least for the time being, even though it appears in several dough formulations on the forum simply because it is not a great deal different than water when the alcohol content is taken into account.

We also added ghee (clarified butter) to the list, which might cause some people to scratch their heads. This ingredient was added so that the tool can be used with naan dough and similar formulations (I discovered that there are quite a few Indian flour-based bread products), to the extent the formulations exist in baker’s percents format or can be converted to such format. The tool should also be usable to make bread doughs if users have workable starting dough weights. I hope that members who find other useful applications will share them with the membership.

Peter

[charbo]

This looks like the first baker's percent spreadsheet I've seen where the sum of all the flours and VWG is more than 100%.  Won't the hydration be understated?

[Pete-zza]

CB,

As noted previously, the principal intended purpose of the tool is to use it with a known set of workable baker's percents, either because they already exist and are stated somewhere or they can be calculated from known dough formulations. I have seen a few spreadsheets, usually for bread doughs, where several flours are combined and the hydration specified in relation to the combination. However, to have gone in that direction with the new tool would have complicated the programming because of all the many possible combinations. Also, most pizza dough recipes that I examined used only one flour, or, in the case of some deep-dish dough formulations, like DKM's as posted on the recipe page, a combination of a white flour and maybe cornmeal or cornflour, etc. If someone decides to replace a given flour in an existing dough formulation with a combination of flours, then it will be necessary in most cases to recalculate the required formula hydration percent since the different flours are likely to have different absorption rates. The tool can't provide answers to those kinds of answers. It simply allows users to experiment with different combinations and provide the quantities in an easy-to-use format. Obviously, if the numbers entered into the tool are faulty then the results of the tool will be faulty too.

Since you specifically mentioned vital wheat gluten, I was reminded of how I recently took a dough formulation in which the vital wheat gluten was combined with flour to create the total formula flour, and I carved out the vital wheat gluten so that it could be stated on a standalone basis as a percent of the other (remaining) flour. I described this exercise at http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,4981.msg42219.html#msg42219 (Reply 8). To do this carve-out, I had to change the baker's percents for all of the listed ingredients, even though the ingredient quantities did not change. The dough formulation that I recited can now be used with the new dough tool to come up with dough formulations for any number and sizes of pizzas having the same characteristics as the original formulation. However, if someone decides to change the formulation from the "snapshot" I provided, they will have to deal with the effects of the changes on the total formula hydration. For example, when vital wheat gluten is added to a formulation where it does not now exist, the recommendation is to add about 1 1/2-2 times the weight of the vital wheat gluten in additional water. Doing that will change the formula hydration. There are many such examples, each of which can affect the hydration in one direction or the other depending on whether the new added ingredient is a dry one or a wet one. In many cases, such as replacing dry table sugar with honey or molasses or some other wet form of sweetener, the difference are likely to be slight when only a few dough balls are made, but to be technically correct one would have to adjust the hydration to reflect the substitutions. Unfortunately, to do these kinds of calcutions requires knowledge or experience and the ability to do the necessary mathematical calculations.

I'm glad you asked the question because it gave me another opportunity to state the logic behind the design of the new tool and to state what the tool can do and what it can't do.

Peter

[PizzaPolice]

Mike & Peter:

Thank you for such a comprehensive program.  I have a similar albeit generic, standalone program.  It never addressed the pizza specifically. 
This is really nice and easy to use. An interview form.  Just like TurboTax for pizza.
I'm diggin' the fact that I can save the web page (and it continues to work) on my desktop in case the internet goes down.

You guys are great!

[Pete-zza]

PizzaPolice,

Thank you. Mike and I learned a lot about a lot of things in the course of designing the various tools, including the most recent one. I think we are both overloaded with trivia at this point, even if it is good and useful trivia.

In my post to charbo, I neglected to mention that when I combine different flours, such as a 60/40 mix of Caputo 00 Pizzeria flour and high-gluten flour to simulate a DiFara's type of flour mix, or a combination of all-purpose and cake or pastry flour to simulate a 00 flour, I treat the combinations in all of the tools, including the new tool, as though they are one flour. I do the division of the flours by individual weights longhand on paper. Since these flour combinations can usually tolerate a reasonable range of hydrations, I usually don't have to change the formula hydration.

Somewhere along the way I am going to try to come up with a general list of changes that one may have to make when substituting ingredients for each other. For example, when one substitutes butter or margarine for oil in an existing dough formulation, technically an adjustment (downward) should be made to the formula hydration because butter and margarine include about 20% water. On the other hand, shortening or lard can be substituted on a one-for-one basis, by weight, with oil because shortening and lard do not include water. When substituting a basic honey for granulated sugar in an existing formulation, you usually will use about 20% more honey because it, too, contains about 20% water. And you will perhaps want to adjust the formula hydration downward to account for the extra water. These numbers are fairly rough but I think they are close enough for our purposes. I recall that November came up with a fair amount of data on sweeteners, and possibly that information will be useful in the conversion exercise.

Peter

[Pete-zza]

Following up on my last post, I did some research on the water content of many of the ingredients in the ingredients list of the new tool. All of the data came from using the database at the nutritiondata.com website. With this data, users should be able to determine the extent of changes required in formula hydration percents when adding ingredients that contain water to an existing dough formulation or when substituting ingredients that contain water for other ingredients in an existing dough formulation that do not contain water. Obviously, reverse changes are required when adding dry ingredients or switching dry ingredients for wet ingredients.

I also did some additional research at the PMQ archives to see if hydration changes are required when replacing a part of the formula flour (usually a white flour) with other types of flours such as semolina, corn flour, corn meal, rye flour, soy flour or potato flour. Other than semolina flour, which Tom Lehmann said in a post did not require any other changes in a dough formulation in which the semolina flour replaced a part of the white flour, I could find very little on the hydration aspects of the other flours. It appears that semolina flour and possibly the other supplementary flours may take longer to hydrate but that fact does not necessarily require changing the formula hydration.

If the above in fact turns out to be true as I continue my research, it may make sense to take these items off of the list in the new tool, even though most of the supplementary flours listed in the tool tend to be used in rather small quantities, and have users account for replacing a part of the formula flour with one or more of these flours on an offline basis, as by noting the changes and quantities on a printout of the tool’s output data. By so doing, all the remaining ingredients in the tool would be specified as a percent of the combined flours. Nonetheless, in the listings below I have indicated the water contents of the different flours in the event someone would like to tweak the formula hydration for any reason. As previously noted with respect to vital wheat gluten, the usual recommendation when vital wheat gluten replaces a portion of the formula flour is to increase the formula water by 1 ½-2 times the weight of the vital wheat gluten. Doing this will, of course, change the hydration percent for the formula water.

Here is the data on percent water in the various ingredients I researched:

Sweeteners:
Honey, 17.14%
Maple syrup (pure), 32%
Molasses (regular), 21.87%
Molasses (blackstrap), 28.6%
Nondiastatic barley malt syrup, 21.3%
Corn syrup (light), 22.7%
Corn syrup (dark), 22%
Corn syrup (high fructose), 24.2%

Solid fats:
Butter (salted), 15.7%
Butter (unsalted), 17.9%
Margarine, 17.5%,
Lard, 0%
Shortening, 0%
Clarified butter (ghee), 0.24% (that is, negligible)

Eggs:
Whole, large, fresh egg, 76%
Fresh, egg whites, 88%

Flours:
Wheat flour, white, all-purpose, enriched, bleached or unbleached, 11.92%
Wheat bread flour, enriched, 13.36%
Wheat flour, whole grain, 10.25%
Wheat flour, 15% protein, 12.86%
Semolina, enriched or unenriched, 12.7%
Corn meal, degermed, enriched, yellow, 11.43%
Corn flour, degermed, yellow, 9.84%,
Corn meal, masa, enriched, 9.04%
Rye flour (medium), 9.80%
Soy flour, 7.2%
Potato flour, 6.5%
Vital wheat gluten, 8.2%

Water Replacements/Substitutes
Milk (fresh), 89-91% (depends on milk type, such as nonfat, lowfat, whole, etc.)
Beer (regular), 92% (plus 3.9% alcohol)
Wine (table), 87% (plus 10.4% alcohol)
Buttermilk (fresh, cultured, lowfat), 90%
Table cream (fluid, light), 74% (plus 19.3% fat)
Yogurt (plain, lowfat), 85% (plus 7% sugar and 1.6% fat)
Soda (e.g., 7-Up or Sprite), 89%

Peter
Edit: Added a new section on water replacement/substitutes.

[Bryan S]

I just used this one and you guys rock. Thanks again. I have one question. Would it be possible to have a box (in all the dough calculators) that we could type in the name of the dough? I like to label all my crusts, i.e. Greek dough, Pan Pizza, N.Y. no oil & sugar........................

[Pete-zza]

Bryan,

I was thinking about the new tool when I saw your post today on the pan pizza you plan to make that includes butter and milk. If the pizza is a big hit, you might note the ingredient quantities to be able to create the baker's percents, dough ball weights, etc., that apply to the pizza. That will give others an opportunity to try the pizza out in the same or other sizes.

As far as your suggestion is concerned, Mike will have a better idea than I as to whether the suggestion can be accommodated in the tool. Our plan at the moment is to act like Microsoft and wait until members give us their feedback, both positive and negative, before making changes to the tool (and the other tools as well). That appears to be the most efficient way to proceed.

Peter

[Boy Hits Car]

I just used this one and you guys rock. Thanks again. I have one question. Would it be possible to have a box (in all the dough calculators) that we could type in the name of the dough? I like to label all my crusts, i.e. Greek dough, Pan Pizza, N.Y. no oil & sugar........................

That shouldn't be a problem.  It sounds like adding a "notes" box would cover your situation as well as others.

-Mike

[Pete-zza]

Recently, one of our members posted a dough formulation in which he substituted buttermilk for all of the water in the formulation. Usually the most common liquid dairy product that is used in dough formulations, albeit not widely, is milk, and often the dry form of milk is used because of its convenience over the liquid form. As one will note, the Enhanced tool includes both wet and dry forms of milk. However, it is also possible to use cream and yogurt in place of at least a part of the total formula water, even though such use is even rarer than using milk or buttermilk.

Other common substitutes for at least a part of the total formula water are beer and wine, although the only dough recipe that I can think of offhand that calls for using wine is one by Mario Batali, in which the wine can be either red or white (see, for example, the dough recipe at http://www.surlatable.com/product/brands/mario+batali/mario+and+armando+batali+pizza.do). Another intriguing example, which appears to be limited to Canada and possibly some adjoining parts of the U.S., is substituting a soda product like Sprite or 7 Up for all or part of the formulation water. An even more interesting application is the use of green tea, as described by forum member November at http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,4358.msg36401/topicseen.html#msg36401.

What is important to keep in mind in using ingredients such as those mentioned above is that, except for the use of green tea which is almost all water, they are not 100% water. For example, liquid buttermilk (cultured, lowfat) is about 90.2% water. Beer is about 92% water (plus 3.9% alcohol), and wine (table wine) is about 87% water (and 10.4% alcohol). 7 Up contains about 89% water. Yogurt (plain, lowfat) includes about 85% water, and cream (light) includes about 74% water. Hence, it will be necessary to adjust the baker’s percent for the water when replacing all or part of the formula water with any of these ingredients.

An ancillary consideration in using the above ingredients is that they also include other components that may require adjusting the dough formulation used. For example, most liquid dairy products include sugar in the form of lactose. However, since lactose is about 1/6th as sweet as table sugar (sucrose), it will usually be necessary to keep the formula sugar level at normal, or close to normal, values. 7 Up also contains sugar, at almost 10%, but the sugar is often in the form of corn syrup which is much closer in sweetness to table sugar and, hence, has to be taken into account when adjusting the sugar component of the total dough formulation. Cream (light) includes about 19.3% fat, so some adjustment to the formula fat may be required when substituting cream for all or part of the formula water.

I have asked Boy Hits Car (Mike) to consider adding the liquid and dry forms of buttermilk to the list of ingredients for the Enhanced tool. I have also edited my earlier post at Reply 6 to indicate the water content of the above ingredients, to make it a bit easier for users to alter a given dough formulation in which all or part of the formula water is to be replaced by one of the abovementioned ingredients.

I might add that the above discussion also applies to some of the other tools that have been posted on the forum, mainly the Lehmann tool which, although originally designed to be used in connection with the basic Lehmann NY style dough formulation, has broader applicability. I suppose that if one wanted to substitute beer for part of the water in a deep-dish dough formulation, or some other similar substitution, then the principles discussed above would also apply to the deep-dish tool.

Peter