Well, I decided to join the crowd and give this one a try. In the hopes to help narrow down what the ideal rise/coldferment times would be required to give this pizza the taste and consistency of a PH Pan Pizza.
Using Pete-zza's formulation in
http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,4607.0.html and the instructions from xPHmgr's original thread (
http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,213.0.html), I went to work creating my doughball in my KitchenAid stand mixer. Doing mostly deep dish, this was very different for me, watching it get kneeded to smithereens... but nevertheless, 10 minutes later, I had a nicely-formed doughball. The Carnation Instant Dry Milk really gave it an interesting texture... very velvety. It was a pleasure to work with. My dough weight was almost spot on at 21.6 oz (
pic1).
I rolled out the dough, and placed it into my oiled, 14' Deep Dish pan ("Bakalon" from Chicago Metallic, not the cheap CM rebrand you find in BB&B). I was really uncomfortable using 4oz of oil (vegetable), so I used 3 (and change) oz instead. I certainly didn't win any geometry contests for my dough disk, but soon enough it wouldn't matter. (
pic2)
Here's where the experiment began. xPHmgr describes allowing the dough to rise until it is 1.5" high (the height of my pan is 2"). After slightly warming my oven then turning it off, I covered my pan with my 14" Pizza Stone (perfect-sized lid) and put them both in. It took between 3 and 4 hours to rise to the described height. (
pic3)
Despite my better judgement, I did NOT "punch down" the dough -- I wanted to stay as true to the original instructions as possible. I threw the pan and stone-lid into the fridge. About 22 hours later, I took the dough out to come to room temperature. From sitting in the fridge, the dough had deflated substantially, but between taking it out of the fridge and putting it in the oven (maybe two hours), it regained it's original, puffy proportions. (
pic4)
At this point, I tapped down a depression for fixins. The dough was unbelievably airy. As I ladled the sauce on, huge bubbles would form that I had to shoo towards the edges to let them escape. The yeast smell was also very powerful! This dough clearly had fermented TOO LONG for this pizza.
In lieu of using a release agent, I brushed the edges with a parmesan-garlic-herb butter. I left a small portion of the crust "virgin" just to see the natural results of the bake-up. In all honesty, any sort of release agent was likely unnecessary, as the oil was still very present around the edges of the dough.
(Con't'd in next post)
