I guess what I was thinking about, was if I wanted to just make a 16" pie with only some olive oil, garlic, and parm on it, how thick should I make the crust. I figure I'd want the entire crust to be the thickness my rim normall ends up.
I have never used the thickness factor that way and honestly wouldn't know how to do it since the dough used to make bread sticks is cut into pieces that are allowed to rise before baking. That is how the individual bread stick dough pieces get their height, at least for those places that let the dough pieces rise before baking. I don't know what thickness factor would to be equivalent to the height of the rim of a standard Lehmann pizza skin.
Since you mentioned the LC Crazy Bread, I went to the LC website and looked at the nutrition data for the LC Crazy Bread at
http://www.littlecaesars.com/menu/nutrition.asp and, according to that data, there are eight bread sticks to a Crazy Bread order, with each bread stick weighing 36 grams. That is for a fully baked bread stick with whatever they put on it in the way of seasonings. 36 grams is about 1.27 ounces. There is some loss in the weight of the dough during baking, so to compensate for that loss and for the weight of seasonings you might want to make a dough stick that weighs, say, 1 3/8 ounces. So, for a dozen dough sticks, one might use 16.5 ounces of dough. If you want to use a Lehmann NY style dough, you can use the expanded dough calculator with the Dough Weight option and determine the amounts of ingredients necessary to make 16.5 ounces of dough. When you are ready to use the dough, you can form them into a dozen dough pieces of the same weight (e.g., 1 3/8 ounce) and size, let them rise, and then bake them. I've never done this, but that is the way I would proceed if I were interested in making a Lehmann Crazy Bread clone product.
No doubt you could make a Lehmann dough for a 16" pizza using a basic thickness factor of say, 0.105, and divide the dough into whatever number and size of dough pieces you would like to make, and let them rise before baking. With this approach, the dough ball would weigh 3.14159 x 8 x 8 x 0.105 = 21.11 ounces. If you flatten the dough to form a rectangular sheet of the right size, whatever that would be, you could form the rolled out or pressed out dough into whatever number of individual bread stick pieces you would like to have, let them rise, and bake them.
If you figure out how you would like to proceed, please let us know what kind of results you get. For what it's worth, when I was doing all of my Papa John's clone experiments, I learned that PJs does not use the rectangular dough sheet method. They use a round skin and form it into the required number of dough pieces. That means that the bread sticks are not identical in size and shape. I believe that Pizza Hut uses a rectangular baking pan of some sort. I haven't investigated the PH bread sticks but a rectangular pan should yield bread sticks of the same size and shape. I believe the PJ bread sticks are baked on pizza screens, just like they do with their pizzas.
Peter
