Scott
I was surprised to see your mix method. Is this what you recommend for your commercial clients or is this what you do at home? Am I correct there is a Chau influence in this method or have you been doing this for some time.
Again thanks for pointing me in the Bosch direction; I'm very happy with the quality of the knead.
Bob
Bob, at one time a few years ago I had read every post on this forum, but lately I just haven't had the time to get in here and absorb everything. Sadly I often end up jumping in at the end of some thread, and I miss stuff that was leading up to it. I have seen Chau's amazing crumb shots, but I actually don't know what his methods are (other than that he uses a really high hydration, stretch and folds, sometimes a bosch, and a modified egg to cook pizzas at a medium high temp). I would love to know what his goto mixing method is, but for now all I know is that his pizzas are truly beautiful.
As far as commercial mixers go, I have been very lucky to work with some pizzerias that have had really great mixers, usually a spiral, and the latest place I am working with has a diving arms mixer. I have been finding that every type of mixer needs a different method, and it seems like all these rests are not necessary with a diving arms mixer (It moves really slow, so it almost rests as it goes). The mixing method I described above goes back many years for me and is actually the exact same method I was using when I first got my electrolux DLX. This was during the days of daily forum contributions, and many PM's back and forth with Jeff Varasano and Marco (pizzanapoletana). Jeff is the one that got me into doing all the rests, and Marco suggested that I try stretch and folds after mixing to firm up the gluten. With the dlx you have to do fairly high hydrations, especially if you don't know all the tricks with that mixer, and the first few months I had it I was unable to go below about 67% hydration with the flours I was using at the time. I have always fondly looked back on those high hydration staggered mixed doughs, but as many of us here know, we get bored, experiments are done, methods evolve, and for a while I began to lower my hydration, crank up my oven temperature to the extremes, and get rid of some of the rest periods. I have clients that need the ability to pile on a decent amount of toppings if thats what the customer wants, so I ended up spending a lot of time developing the wettest dough I could that would still allow plenty of topings and decent crust stability....especially with larger 18 inch pizzas which is an important size for some pizzerias to offer. Chau's absolutely gorgeous crumb shots along with the Brian Spangler posts a few months back really got me thinking about how great those early DLX doughs were, and since the spangler posts I have been working on that type of dough again, but pushing the hydration even a little higher than I did back in my early dlx days. I definitely owe Chau/Brian big time because I have basically rediscovered one of my favorite pizzas.....really wet dough, well developed gluten, and a medium-high bake temp.
