Norma,
If anyone scans the photos of your pizzas at the Lehmann preferment thread, at http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,9908.msg86106.html#msg86106, I think they will readily see how much you accomplished and how successful you were with that dough--in so many different ways. What you did there reflected the high standards that you set for yourself for your pizzas. The fact that your customers at market could not tell that your pizzas were out of the ordinary is perhaps unfortunate but remember that those customers were pretty much captive, with few choices of pizzas. Perhaps your Lehmann preferment pizzas would have fared better if you were running a pizzeria full time where customers would be in a position to choose among several competing pizzerias. That is perhaps where your higher quality product would have made its mark. I believe that the members of the forum who visited you at your stand and sampled your pizzas would agree with me.
Even now, you are still looking to make the best pizzas possible, not just something that barely registers on the quality chart. And just think how much you and I learned from all of our collaborations on the Lehmann preferment thread. That thread has almost 73,500 page views. That puts it in all-star category and means that people were following what you were doing very carefully and with great interest.
Peter
Peter,
I don’t want to take this thread off-topic anymore about my pizzas, but I did learn a lot on the preferment Lehmann dough thread though trying that dough and all of your posts. I still want to experiment and might do an experiment at home, (in the next few days, if I remember my IR gun at market) with my BBQ mod to see if a one day Lehmann dough can get better taste in the crust with higher heat. Just last week at market I tried to set my deck oven up to 550 degrees F for a little while, but although my bottom crusts didn’t burn, they were too dark.
I think maybe the preferment Lehmann dough pizza might have faired out better if I was running a regular pizzeria in our area. I haven’t tasted any good NY style pizza in my area for a long while. Different customers do ask where I have a regular pizza business though and say they would purchase from me it I did. As you know I am too old to run a pizzeria everyday.
My taste testers always enjoy my experimental pizzas. The one man that is my taste tester commented many different times that he thought that the first pies I made were the best ones. I sure can’t remember what those pies tasted like, but know the dough was way off and way over fermented, wouldn‘t open right and so many other problems. That makes me wonder sometimes if a better fermented dough does give a better taste.
I guess you already know where this is leading, in that, after I have tasted Steve’s Lehmann dough pies in his BBQ grill mod, nothing compares those pizzas for a NY style, at least to me. The only reason I am mentioning about those pies is that Steve’s dough was so over fermented that it popped his plastic container lids off and he had to punch his dough ball down at his home a few hours before he went to the skaters event. The one picture on that thread shows how the dough ball was punched down and the pictures of the containers show how much the dough balls were fermented even after the punch down. He really doesn’t know what that happened in a two day cold fermentation, except he used IDY from two different containers and he guessed that is why the dough balls fermented so much. Steve’s dough balls that day were stored right in a cooler with a lot of ice. We opened those dough balls cold, with very little warm-up time, and the pizzas didn’t even bubble in the middle at all. That still puzzles me too, unless the high heat took care of that. I sure wish I could make pies like Steve’s at market, but know that I can‘t.
Steve and I talk about different pizzas all the time, and usually we can’t figure out what is going on, but we do learn from those talks. Steve does like my regular one day Lehmann dough pizzas at market, but I know somehow I can do better. It is just finding the better way that is hard.
I will post more on my experiments at my other threads at another time.
Norma
