Norma,
Over at the Mellow Mushroom thread, at Reply 1755 at
http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,3940.msg195844.html#msg195844, you indicated that you wanted to use a sweet white sorghum syrup produced by Briess in one of your regular Lehmann doughs. You reproduced the spec sheet for that product at Reply 1750 at
http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,3940.msg195574.html#msg195574.
The Briess sweet white sorghum syrup is unlike any I have studied to date. As the spec sheet for that product indicates, it comprises (on an as-is basis), 5% glucose, 35% maltose, 13% maltotriose, and 23% higher saccharides. As you can see from the sucrose equivalency chart at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Relativesweetness.png, glucose is about three-quarters as sweet as sucrose and maltose is about a third as sweet as sucrose. I did some further research on the maltotriose and read that that sweetener, which is called a trisaccharide, is about 30% as sweet as sucrose. The higher saccharides, or polysaccharides, have little sweetness. An example of a polysaccharide is cellulose.
Yeast likes glucose, which is a simple sugar, and uses it for fermentation. As described in the article on Sugar Transformations (Rosada) at
http://www.theartisan.net/The_Artisan_Yeast_Treatise_Section_One.htm, maltose gets degraded into glucose by the maltase enzyme. As best I can tell from my research on the maltotriose, it contains glucose molecules but I believe that they are in a form that is not fermented by yeast to produce carbon dioxide and alcohol but rather is used in yeast reproduction. So, it appears that the simple sugars that are fermentable are the glucose and maltose that is degraded to glucose.
I was about to do a sucrose equivalency calculation when I discovered that the spec sheet you posted says, under SENSORY CHARACTERISTICS, that the Briess sweet white sorghum syrup is 55 on the sucrose scale. I take that to mean that the Briess product is 55% as sweet as sucrose. If that is correct, that would mean that in a Lehmann dough formulation calling for the use of sucrose, you would use almost double the amount of the Briess sorghum syrup, by weight, to get the equivalent sweetness. However, if you are using a small amount of sucrose to begin with, you are unlikely to detect sweetness in the finished crust when using almost double that in the form of the Briess sorghum syrup. Of course, that may not be a concern since it has not been an objective to have a sweet Lehmann crust.
What I cannot answer at this point is whether almost double the amount of the Briess sorghum syrup is enough to promote fermentation at a rate that will allow you to make and use the dough in accordance with the timetable you need at market, given that about 46% of the Briess product may not be fermentable. You might need to use more than double the amount of the Briess sorghum product, or you might need to increase the amount of yeast to speed up the fermentation, or possibly a combination of both. Increasing the amount of the Briess product by several percent would not be the end of the world since you would have to use quite a bit of it before it would show up as detectable sweetness in the finshed crust. So, if you are using say, 1% sucrose now, you might try using three times that in your Lehmann dough formulation. To test that number, you might ask Steve King at Briess what he would suggest as a percent of the Briess sorghum syrup to use for a pizza dough. Or you can simply do a test dough and see what happens. It appears that the Briess sorghum syrup is about 20.5% water, so technically you would want to adjust the formula hydration to account for that water. However, at the amounts of the sorghum syrup you would be using, I would imagine that the amount of water is small and would not perturbate the formula hydration to the point where the hydration would be increased by an amount that would lead to an overly extensible dough. But, if you want, we can always adjust the formula hydration once you decide on what you would like to do.
Peter
