Top Secret Recipes, Dominoes Pizza

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There is a new show called Top Secret Recipes. The host of the show, Todd Wilbur, reverse engineers famous recipes. Tomorrow night, he will be trying to reverse engineer Dominoes Pizza. I know a lot of people dont care for Dominoes, but it may be interesting the see his process. The show is on CMT, Friday nights at 9:00pm.

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[scott123]

Todd Wilbur has been posting recipes online for years, and, although he's picked up a few tricks over this time (lab analysis, dumpster diving, stakeouts, subterfuge, etc.), he still lacks one critical tool- the guy has absolute NO sense of taste.  All the tools in the world will do nothing for you if can't detect and replicate flavors. Every one of his copycat recipes that I've seen has been written like he's throwing darts at ingredient names on a dartboard.

Not to mention that all these tricks he's bringing out are only in recent years.   I've seen Todd Wilbur recipes of old with ingredients that conflicted with ingredient lists on product packaging.  Can you imagine reverse engineering a commercial product and ignoring the actual ingredient list? That's the massive intellect that is Todd Wilbur 

As far as the show goes, I've watched the first three episodes, and I can tell you, with absolute certainty, that there's no secrets being given away or discovered.  Todd tries to be funny and attempts to steal ingredients while the executives have their backs turned, but, in reality, the company is a sponsor of the show and knows exactly what's going on. Not only are secrets not being revealed, but, with the heavy amount of corporate involvement, I would wager that some of the information is most likely a misdirection.

I could forgive Todd his long history of lame copycat recipes, but the shilling he's doing on this show is reprehensible.  Some people might find his staged mischievous shenanigans amusing, but for those of us that take reverse engineering secret recipes seriously, it's a major slap in the face.

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I have finished watching the last 2 shows, and I must agree with everything scott123 has said. Much of the show is staged and a 1 hour long advertisement spot. With that being said, I did learn a couple of things, so I guess I will still watch the Dominoes show.

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[ThePieman]

he still lacks one critical tool- the guy has absolute NO sense of taste. 

That could be a slight problem... 

[scott123]

Okay, I had this DVRed and finally got around to watching it.  I attached a screenshot below.  As you can see, it's pretty obvious that Domino's had final cut on this, otherwise they wouldn't have blurred out the posters in the background. It's obviously not a list of phone numbers, but something related to making the pizza, as this is supposed to be their test kitchen.

Anyway, as far as the rest of the episode is concerned, the whole show had me yelling at the screen like a fan watching a football game with countless fumbled balls and intercepted throws.  Todd Wilbur is a nitwit.

[chickenparm]

I guess when you design a sauce where bacteria will never grow,it must be a secret.



Scott,you had me    when you said the guy was a Nitwit.My Dad used to say that all the time when he was alive,about people he thought were clueless or trying to BS ya.

I have not heard anyone use that term in years and it was great that you used it there.

[scott123]

Thanks, Bill  I was looking for a disparaging descriptor, but trying not to swear.

[patdakat345]

Let's see. We are dissatisfied with the way pizza chains make pizza. So we come to these forums to learn how to make a better pizza. Then we we see posts like these that want to reverse engineer what we wanted to get away from in the first place. It's equivalent to reverse engineering a Yugo!

pat

[buceriasdon]

pat, I hear you but I think it's a good thing the forum appeals to a broad spectrum of pizza lovers and tastes in pizza.
Don

Let's see. We are dissatisfied with the way pizza chains make pizza. So we come to these forums to learn how to make a better pizza. Then we we see posts like these that want to reverse engineer what we wanted to get away from in the first place. It's equivalent to reverse engineering a Yugo!

pat

[Pete-zza]

Let's see. We are dissatisfied with the way pizza chains make pizza. So we come to these forums to learn how to make a better pizza. Then we we see posts like these that want to reverse engineer what we wanted to get away from in the first place. It's equivalent to reverse engineering a Yugo!

pat,

The reality is that this forum draws an enormous amount of traffic from people who are looking for clones of the major chain pizzas. According to the Alexa data on this forum, about 91% of the forum's visitors come directly from Google.com (and about 9.5% from YouTube), and about 79% of them go back to Google.com after leaving the forum. Most likely, they did searches related to pizza making, including recipes. Of the top ten threads on this forum with the most page views, five are for clone recipes (#11 on the list is also a clone recipe). Many members register on the forum just to be able to search for recipes and related information. The board with extraordinarily heavy page views is the American board, which covers most of the chain pizzas (http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/board,36.0.html). Many of our members and other visitors live in parts of the country where essentially their only choices of pizza places are the chain pizzas. That alone will create an interest in chain pizza and create loyalty to the chains that sell them.

If you look at the latest (2010) industry report at http://pmq.com/digital/201009/56.html, you will see that the Big Four pizza chains (Pizza Hut, Domino's, Papa John's and Little Caesars) control almost 31% of all pizza sales (over 36 billion dollars) in the U.S. and if other top chains are included, the number goes to around 48%. The Big Four also control around 27% of all stores, which comes to about 17,848 stores out of a total of 64,951 pizza stores in the U.S. Add in other top chains, and they control about 28,175 stores. With the big advertising budgets of the big chains, they are able to create an attraction and loyalty to the products they sell. So, it is not at all surprising to me that visitors come to this forum in search of clone recipes. In the case of Domino's, their pizza recipe is a challenging one to reverse engineer and clone because Domino's uses frozen dough balls and they include a lot of chemicals, additives and conditioners that ordinary people are unlikely to have in their pantries.

Peter

[Meatballs]

Hey, lets reinvent this thread....

Here is Todd Wilbur's Domino's clone recipe I converted to percentages from his website  since exact quantities are difficult to achieve in the calculator, I've put Todd's quantity in parentheses as the start of the line....


(25 ounces wt)   Flour (100%):                           700.39 g  |  24.71 oz | 1.54 lbs
(16 ounces liq)   Water (65%):                               455.26 g  |  16.06 oz | 1 lbs
(1 tsp)              ADY (.5%):                           3.5 g | 0.12 oz | 0.01 lbs | 0.93 tsp | 0.31 tbsp
(2 tsp)              Salt (1.6%):                          11.21 g | 0.4 oz | 0.02 lbs | 2.01 tsp | 0.67 tbsp
(3 tbsp)            Vegetable (Soybean) Oil (6%):    42.02 g | 1.48 oz | 0.09 lbs | 9.25 tsp | 3.08 tbsp
(3 tbsp)            Sugar (5%):                            35.02 g | 1.24 oz | 0.08 lbs | 8.78 tsp | 2.93 tbsp

                  Total (178.1%):                            1247.4 g | 44 oz | 2.75 lbs | TF = N/A

Tod recommends a 50/50 split of bread flour and pizza flour (high gluten) but says you can use bread flour alone if you must.

He rises the dough in the fridge for 48 hours, and bakes at 450 convection or 475 no convection.  The dough recipe makes two 14 inch pizzas for a TF of 0.14

Lets critique the recipe and not the show or the man, I think he has a really good recipe for the regular joe to produce a great pizza.  This recipe beats most all home recipes you will find on the net outside of this site, and just to be mean and spiteful and cause a hugh blow-up (he he) I think its a better starting place than Reinhardt.... There. (Please, please, I was only kidding....kinda)

I would (well... do) change several parameters but the basics of a Lehmann dough are here...did he find this site in his search, or Pizza Today or PMQ or is he more crafty than we give him credit for?   Personally I have several of his books and make the recipes often,  with a little common sense and skill, his recipes work, exact cones...no, close enough to fool most people...sure.

I would like to visit his sauce recipe too...

Ron

PS here is the link to his site...  http://www.topsecretrecipes.com/Domino-s-Large-Cheese-Pizza-Recipe.html

[Jackie Tran]

Good call Meatballs and thanks for converting the formula.   The sugar looks high to me at 5%.  I haven't made a dough with 5% sugar before but wonder if that will make the crust overly sweet.  From what I remember of the Dominoes pizzas I ate recently, I don't recall the crust tasting sweet. 

The oil also seems a tad high to me as well.   I'd probably shoot for 2-3% sugar max, and lower the oil down to 4% to start. 

Pat just to add to what others have mentioned, you can learn a lot about making pizza in general from the act of reverse engineering or cloning.  It's a good place for beginners to start and the knowledge from these exercises can serve one well down the road in creating his/her ideal pizza, even if it's completely different from the chains.

Chau

[Pete-zza]

Ron,

Did you actually try the recipe? If so, that recipe is not really like the Lehmann NY style dough recipe. With the amounts of sugar and oil that you show, the recipe is really an American style dough recipe that is close to a Papa John's dough but with a considerably higher hydration, one that is made even higher on an "effective" hydration basis by the large amount of oil (which also has a "wetting" effect on the dough).

Peter

[Pete-zza]

The sugar looks high to me at 5%.  I haven't made a dough with 5% sugar before but wonder if that will make the crust overly sweet.  From what I remember of the Dominoes pizzas I ate recently, I don't recall the crust tasting sweet. 

Chau,

I think that 5% sugar is somewhat on the cusp. If you are overly sensitive to sugar in baked goods, you might detect the sweetness. But, I think for most people you have to get above 5% to taste the sugar. Usually, you don't want to get too high on the sugar because it can exert an osmotic effect on the yeast and inhibit its performance. Of course, one way to counteract that is to just use more yeast and sacrifice part of it the name of more sweetness. Also, it appears from some of my recent experiments on the Mellow Mushroom thread that if there is also a lot of salt in the dough, that can partially mute the sensation of sweetness.

A high oil content is also common for an American style dough.

Peter

[Pete-zza]

Ron,

In case you haven't seen it, you might want to take a look at the thread at http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,16224.msg158606.html#msg158606. Using the recipe as given in that thread, I used the conversions factors embedded in the expanded dough calculating tool at http://www.pizzamaking.com/expanded_calculator.html to come up with the dough formulation given below. To come up with that dough formulation, I assumed that the water is given in the recipe by volume rather than by weight, and that the yeast is active dry yeast (ADY) because the instructions call for dissolving the yeast in the water (at room temperature). To get a weight of 16 fluid ounces of water, I used my digital scale and got 16.4 ounces (by weight). One place where I take issue with Wilbur's instructions is combining all of the sugar (3 tablespoons) with the yeast in the water. Sugar at high levels can exert an osmotic effect on yeast and cause liquids in the yeast cells to leach out, resulting in impaired yeast performance. If sugar is to be added to the water along with the yeast, it should only be a pinch or so. As I noted in the thread referenced above, if the bread flour is a flour like the King Arthur bread flour (KABF) and the high-gluten flour is Bouncer flour, the effective protein content of the blend is 13.228% (I used the Mixed Mass Conversion Calculator at http://tools.foodsim.com/ to do the calculation). Like the other major pizza chains, Domino's does not use bromated flours but, as noted below, Domino's uses ascorbic acid, which is a known substitute for postassium bromate. So, using the KABF and a nonbromated version of the Bouncer's flour would comport with Domino's practices.

Here is my version of the Wilbur dough formulation:

Flour Blend* (100%): Water (Bottled) (65.6%): ADY (0.5333%): Salt (1.575%): Vegetable (Soybean) Oil (5.7672%): Sugar (5.0625%): Total (178.538%):

708.75 g  |  25 oz | 1.56 lbs 464.94 g  |  16.4 oz | 1.02 lbs 3.78 g | 0.13 oz | 0.01 lbs | 1 tsp | 0.33 tbsp 11.16 g | 0.39 oz | 0.02 lbs | 2 tsp | 0.67 tbsp 40.88 g | 1.44 oz | 0.09 lbs | 9 tsp | 3 tbsp 35.88 g | 1.27 oz | 0.08 lbs | 9 tsp | 3 tbsp 1265.39 g | 44.63 oz | 2.79 lbs | TF = N/A

*The Flour Blend comprises 13 ounces bread flour and 12 ounces high-gluten flour (such as Bouncer's)
Note: The dough is for two 14" pizzas; nominal thickness factor = 0.144976; no bowl residue compensation.

As the above formulation indicates, the total dough weight is 44.63 ounces, or 22.32 ounces for a single dough ball. That value seems high to me, although the use of a standard home oven to bake the pizza as opposed to a commercial conveyor oven may require a somewhat greater dough weight to get a finished pizza that weighs about the same as a real Domino's pizza of the same size. I calculated a thickness factor for the Wilbur dough of 0.144976, as noted above. That value also seems high to me.

The ingredients are in the correct pecking order for a Domino's clone, based on the ingredients list given for a hand tossed dough at the Domino's website at http://express.dominos.com/pages/ingredients.jsp. As can be seen there, Domino's also uses other ingredients like vital wheat gluten, whey, L-cysteine and ascorbic acid, in part because the Domino's dough balls are frozen and apparently require or benefit from the additives and conditioners. Quite naturally, the Wilbur recipe wouldn't include such ingredients. But if I were to reverse engineer and clone the Domino's pizza dough, I would perhaps use several of the other ingredients listed at the Domino's website and I perhaps would freeze the dough balls.

Good luck.

Peter

[Meatballs]

First;           no I haven't tried the dough yet,  I plan to with some adjustments, as noted by others, drop the sugar, my convection oven will incinerate the crust at 5% sugar, my usual dough contains 0.5% sugar and browns nicely in my baking conditions, however, in a home oven at 475F, 5% may produce good results.  I am very impressed that he recommends convection - smoke it if you got it.

Second;       I'm interested in the oil content, I use 1% normally but Domino's does have a much softer crust than my preferences allow and I feel that the oil may deliver that.

Third;         A thickness factor of .14 is really too thick for my challenged pancreas to handle without upsetting my doctor, but so is domino's pizza.  I normally use a 0.08 TF which allows me to split a 12 inch with my wife, I would make them .1TF if I could.

When I said it was basically a Lehmann's dough I was refering to the basic ingredients and 48 hour rest in the fridge.  While the quantities of some of the ingredients are outside a classic Lehmann's NY style, so is domino's pizza crust in my book.

Pete, I don't really think there is any difference in our dough calculations, yes yours are more precise by hundredths and extend into the 10 thousandths of a percent for some ingredients but round at the tenth of a percent and we are identical.  I feel this level of accuracy is appropriate for any food item, but, even though I could kill a patient in the pharmacy with this attitude, its ok in the kitchen, really.  As to the sugar percentage stunning the yeast, no way.   By calculating brix for the sugar one gets 7.71 brix which is roughly 1.030 specific gravity, this is the strength of a shankbier, one of the lightest styles of beer made, and the lowest in Germany, baking yeast can easily handle this concentration of sugar.  I would be more worried that the sugar would be fermented before you could pour it into the flour

I think it will be fun to reproduce Todd's pizza as per his recipe, if I eat less than half of the pizza, I could still make it as directed and just have some leftovers (although this has never happened before in my house regarding pizza.)  As I write this I've come to the conclusion to try his recipe start to finish but just make one 14".  Give me a week as I have a batch of my usual dough in the fridge as I type, awaiting this weeks pizza night.  Next week its Domino's clone.

What is everybody's opinion of the sauce, like the dough recipe, it looks legitimate.  Its not too different from my 6 in 1 "Classic" I usually make, which is also a Lehmann adaption.  I like the use of crushed and puree and the spicing.


When I make it I'll report back with photos.

Ron

Oh, just looked at Pete's link, didn't know this was discussed over there, should I move posts there or just run a second thread here?

[Pete-zza]

Ron,

You are correct that the two dough formulations are essentially the same. I wanted to see if my numbers were like yours and also to see if my numbers would fit the ingredients list given at the Domino's website.

On the matter of the three tablespoons of sugar in the water with the yeast, I was relying on Tom Lehmann's advice that only a small amount of sugar be added to the water with the yeast (ADY), and certainly not all of the sugar, as he points out in his PMQ Think Tank posts at http://thinktank.pmq.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=7282&p=49116&hilit=#p49116 and http://thinktank.pmq.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=5091&p=30032&hilit=#p30032. I never add the sugar to the water with the yeast so I have not observed what would happen if I did.

Peter

[Meatballs]

Made a batch of Todd's pizza sauce for the trial next week, the only change I made was to use 6in1 instead of mixed crushed and puree - figure that's pretty much what 6in1 is anyway.  As I was just finishing the whisking my wife walked by and I had her dip a finger and tell me what she thought... Her statement was "Hey, that's Domino's flavor, tastes just like a domino's pizza"  So far so good.  Since I had my regular dough last night I tried the new sauce and was very pleased, but, since it was a Hawaiian pizza with fresh pineapple it was difficult to judge the level of sweetness.  I think its going to work very well and will definitely be using this as a variation from my regular sauce when I want a change. 

Ron

[Linux]

Made a batch of Todd's pizza sauce for the trial next week, the only change I made was to use 6in1 instead of mixed crushed and puree - figure that's pretty much what 6in1 is anyway.  As I was just finishing the whisking my wife walked by and I had her dip a finger and tell me what she thought... Her statement was "Hey, that's Domino's flavor, tastes just like a domino's pizza"  So far so good.  Since I had my regular dough last night I tried the new sauce and was very pleased, but, since it was a Hawaiian pizza with fresh pineapple it was difficult to judge the level of sweetness.  I think its going to work very well and will definitely be using this as a variation from my regular sauce when I want a change. 

Ron

I know this is a old post but I wanted to know what the results of the pizza were. Did it turn out good? Did it taste like dominos?