Scott,
Now the picture is getting clearer.
After looking over the last dough formulation you posted, actually several times, I could not see anything fundamentally wrong with it except that the hydration seemed high for a home oven application and I wondered how you would measure out the minuscule amounts of yeast. I have made doughs with trivial amounts of yeast many times and I have had to use a set of mini measuring spoons such as shown at
http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,5583.msg47264.html#msg47264. For your single dough ball, the total formula ADY comes to about 5/64ths of a teaspoon, or a bit over 5 "drops". The ADY for the sponge comes to a bit less than 3 1/2 drops, and the ADY for the final mix comes to a bit more than 1 1/2 drops.
Your single dough ball weight of 6.91 ounces, when used to make a 10" pizza, translates to a thickness factor of 6.91/(3.14159 x 5 x 5) = 0.08798. That corresponds to a typical thickness factor that is used to make a New York style pizza. I assume that Pizzeria Mozza makes 10" pizzas and you were trying to do the same. Is that correct?
My best guess is that your oven and the dough formulation are not properly matched. It is also not axiomatic that using a very high hydration value will always translate into an above average oven spring with a light, open and airy interior crumb and a crispy exterior. As I mentioned earlier in this thread, a very high hydration dough does not do especially well in my home electric oven. A good example of what I had in mind when I made that comment can be seen in Reply 31 at
http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,7745.msg69521.html#msg69521. You can see another example at Reply 3 at
http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,8476.msg73691.html#msg73691. It can take a lot of heat to "lift" the very highly hydrated dough so that you get the amount of steam needed to produce a really good oven spring. My oven in its unmodified form apparently falls short in that capability. Also, if you decide to let the pizza bake longer, you will usually end up with a dryer crust that can be quite chewy and even cracker-like in parts. That may also help explain why you got good crust coloration, through caramelization and Maillard reactions.
In your case, you might try using a lower total formula hydration and convert the dough formulation to a new sponge format. You might also want to either invest in a set of mini measuring spoons or else make a larger dough batch such that you can use normal measuring spoons to measure out the ADY. In that case, you should use only a small amount of the sponge water to rehydrate the ADY at around 105 degrees F, for about 10 minutes.
If you proceed along the above lines, I hope that you will come back and let us know how things turn out.
Peter
