In the next post, I will present four Luigi clone dough formulations for testing purposes. In this post, I will discuss what I did and how and why so it will hopefully be clear how I arrived at all of my numbers.
The four dough formulations in the next post are based on using 25-, 30-, 32- and 50-pound bags of the Pendleton Power high-gluten flour. By way of recapitulation, the 25-, 32- and 50-pound bags of the Power flour are unbleached. The 30-pound bag of Power flour is bleached. We don’t know exactly which size bag or flour was used in the video (although we tend not to believe that it is 50 pounds), or whether the flour in the Luigi video was bleached or unbleached. That is the reason for the multiple dough formulations and also why I have included examples of both bleached and unbleached Power flours. The latest information has it that Luigi is using 50-pound bags of Power flour, along with IDY. In the video, Guy Fieri describes the yeast as “dry active yeast”. Presumably, he means ADY. For my purposes, I used ADY but it is easy enough to convert that to IDY should anyone wish to do so. If Guy Fieri was in error and he really meant IDY, then the dough formulations will have to be corrected at such time as the error is confirmed.
For the hydration value in the dough formulations, I used 65%. That is the rated absorption value for the Power flour, as I recently reported. Also, when I looked at the Luigi video, I felt that the hydration value he used was about 65%, strictly from the appearance of the dough balls that were made shortly after the dough was completed. In a home setting using standard mixers, one might choose to use a lower hydration value since home equipment in most cases is not as good at hydrating a flour and developing the gluten structure as a commercial Hobart mixer in a commercial setting. As scott123 told us, the water used in the Luigi video is Crystal Geyser spring water, in gallon jugs. He should also get credit for having identified the Pendleton Power flour as the flour used by Luigi in the video.
In order to determine how much yeast and salt to use, I did some calculations from the video, as earlier described, and put together a cardboard mock-up of a bowl having the dimensions mentioned in Reply 172 at
http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,14928.msg151794.html#msg151794. I even glued a thin black plastic film to the inside of my bowl so that the lines of demarcation between the ingredients in the bowl would be more pronounced against the black backdrop. I did my best to carefully eyeball the amounts of ingredients as I put them into my bowl, watching frames of the video as I did so, but I was also conscious that this is not a perfect exercise and that there are also compaction dynamics with yeast and salt that can affect the final amounts that end up in the bowl (Luigi would have encountered the same laws of physics when he put the ingredients in the various bowls). However, I am comfortable about what I did overall.
To be sure that the yeast shown in the video was in two bowls, and not just one, I viewed the yeast in my bowl through a translucent container such as the one shown at 1:00 in the video (that partly obscures one of the bowls) and then did the same with salt in a bowl. The two different colors (dull for the yeast and brighter for the salt) led me to conclude that there are two bowls of yeast in the video. If the only yeast was the small amount shown in one of the bowls in the video, and there was something else in the other bowl adjacent to it (the one partly obscured by the translucent water pitcher), the amount of yeast from a baker’s percent would be woefully inadequate for a normal fermentation. Also, the stream of yeast going into the water as shown in the video is much more than a small amount.
I should also mention that I measured out the volume of yeast using IDY, not ADY. I did not have ADY in bulk to use for the weighings. However, I converted the weight of the IDY to a corresponding weight of ADY. For the conversion, I used the conversion data built into the expanded dough calculating tool, which is the tool I used to come up with the four Luigi dough clone formulations in the next post. As a cross check, I also looked at the conversion factors built into the theartisan.net yeast conversion table at
http://www.theartisan.net/convert_yeast_two.htm, and the conversion data from that table is quite close to my values. If people want to do a bit of math, they can use the theartisan.net yeast conversion table to do the conversions if they prefer to use those numbers.
As I discussed before, I believe that there are two bowls of salt used in the video to make Luigi’s dough. When I later did the calculations for the salt baker’s percent, it was clear that two bowls of salt were used because using only one would have produced baker’s percent numbers for the salt that would have been too low in my opinion. To get an idea as to how low, one might just divided the salt baker’s percents in the four Luigi clone dough formulations by a factor of roughly two.
As I also noted before, I could not find a bowl on the table for the sugar. In the video, Luigi says he uses a small amount of sugar to help the yeast get started but I did not see him holding a bowl of the sugar. The video only shows about a four-second fan or stream of sugar going into the mixer bowl. So, I tried to simulate what he did by reaching into my sugar bag, grabbing a handful and releasing it from a height of a couple of feet to create a four-second stream into a bowl. That is the amount reflected in the dough formulations in the next post. If I am wrong, I will need evidence of it and will happily receive it.
Members will have the option of deciding which Luigi clone dough formulation to use. Since all of the dough formulations are based on using full bags of flours, those wishing to come up with a dough formulation for a particular size pizzas can do so by selecting the Thickness Factor option of the expanded dough calculating tool (at
http://www.pizzamaking.com/expanded_calculator.html), and then enter the desired pizza size, a thickness factor value of 0.070736, and the baker’s percents for the ADY (or the correct percent of IDY if substituted for the ADY), for the salt and for the sugar from the clone dough formulation they would like to try. The Luigi video only mentions using 18 ounces of dough for an 18” pizza. Since most people do not have ovens big enough to make 18” pizzas directly on pizza stones, it makes sense to make smaller sizes. I did not use any bowl residue compensation for any of the four Luigi clone dough formulations since I was trying to recreate what I think is happening in the Luigi video. Members should feel free to use them if they so wish when making one or more dough balls in a home setting, which is my standard practice.
Peter
