Deep Dish

[buzz]

This from Pat Bruno (who, IMO, gives bad recipes in his Chicago pizza book)--

Deep-Dish Pizza Dough Recipe
Yields: about 38 pounds of dough

25 pounds flour (11 to 12 percent protein)
9 1/2 pounds water (70-80 F)
3 ounces active dry yeast
4 ounces salt
5 ounces sugar
4 pounds vegetable oil

Optional: 3 ounces of egg shade (a liquid food colorant) to the above dough recipe will give the dough a rich golden color.

- Scale the flour. Pour the water into the mixing bowl. Add the yeast, salt, and sugar. Mix with a whisk to combine. Add the flour. Run the mixer at speed 2-3 minutes to combine. Add the vegetable oil. Mix for an additional 8-10 minutes, or until the dough cleans the side of the bowl. The dough must be soft and pliable, not stiff.

Note the long mixing time--maybe this is what restaurants need to mix huge batches of dough, but this doesn't translate into making individual pizzas at home (I don't know how those big mixers work). To make biscuit-like crust, you just can't knead for more than 2 minutes--otherwise the result is very bready.

[bakerboy]

Buzz.  Thats a working recipe.  Is this dough getting a bulk rise before cutting out and shaping?  Your right, after 10 min. of mixing your not going to have biscuit dough by any stretch of the imagination.  Its going to be a smooth supple dough.  However, this recipe just might be what your looking for after all for a couple of reasons. 
4 lbs. of oil in the recipe is going to act as a "shortening" lubricating and shortening the gluten in the dough.  I think 4 lbs. is alot for this recipe but thats probably why they have you mixing the dough without the oil first, to let the gluten develop, then add the oil for the long mix.  good idea. 
Oil can absorb more heat than water giving a crust a different kind of crispiness.  not "cracker like" with a lean, thin pizza dough, or heavy like a biscuit can be, but more of a "shortbread cookie" crispiness without all the sugar of course.
Cutting this recipe by a factor of ten would bring it to a more home friendly recipe.

[buzz]

I find that adding more oil (more than, say, @ 10%) to the dough leads to a greasier-tasting pizza. But obviously, the fat and shorter kneading time (less gluten formation) will result in a more biscuit-like crust.

[Pete-zza]

Buzz,

Have you tried the recipe, do you plan to, or do you want to? I ask since there may be a way to downsize the recipe to a home setting. One of the good things about the recipe is that the ingredients are at least given in weights so that baker's percents can be easily calculated. But baker's percents alone will not allow you to accurately downsize the recipe. It would be helpful, for example, if Bruno gave a typical example, such as a certain amount (weight) of dough to be used in a particular deep-dish pan of a given diameter and depth. Knowing the thickness of the dough as it is formed in the pan would also be a useful data point. Then the downsizing would be pretty easy, although you would have to convert weights into volumes, which is your particular modus operandi. But this is not a big deal, and I could help you with it if you wish to get to a test sample to work on. 

A second way to downsize would be to assume a thickness factor (e.g., something over 0.13), calculate the amount of dough that would be needed for a particular pan size and depth (assuming the dough goes up to the top of the pan), and use the baker's percents to determine the quantities of ingredients conforming to that particular amount of dough. This approach might come close to what you want, but there is no way of knowing how close since it is based on an assumption.

A third way to downsize would be to do as Bakerboy has suggested, and somewhat arbitrarily downsize the recipe by, say, a factor of ten, and then see how much of the dough is needed for your particular size and depth of pan. You might be able to fine tune the downsizing factor by looking at a known recipe, such as DKM's, and using your pan size and depth to at least get a ballpark dough weight to start with. But, knowing the amount of dough you start with, by weight, and subtracting the weight of the excess, if any, would then provide a fairly accurate dough weight that could then be de-constructed by baker's percents to specify the quantities of ingredients needed. Again, this approach would require weighing things and converting from weights to volumes in your case.

As far as I can see, there would be nothing in any of the downsizing approaches that would prevent you from processing the dough using you present preferred kneading technique.

FYI, the amount of oil in the recipe comes to 16% by weight of flour (4 lbs./25 lbs. = 16%). That may seem high but it is not as unusual as it may appear. DKM's recipe, for example, uses over 19% oil by weight of flour, and I have since seen examples of over 20%.

If any of the above is of any interest to you, let me know if I can help with the math and weight/volume conversions.

Peter

[buzz]

I doubt I'll try it, since my recipe already comes out as a perfect match to Giordano's, and it's so good!

[DKM]

I've seen that recipe before at a place I worked.  Most interesting since we didn't make "Deep Dish" pizzas with it.

DKM