Having done a fair amount of legwork to come up with a possible Sbarro’s dough clone formulation, I decided to give the dough formulation a try. For this effort, I decided to use the King Arthur Sir Lancelot high-gluten flour (I would have preferred All Trumps or equivalent flour), non-diastatic barley malt syrup, and lard. The specific dough formulation was as follows:
Flour (100%):
Water (56%):
ADY (0.25%):
Salt (2%):
Non-Diastatic Barley Malt Syrup (2.22%):
Lard (2.5%):
Total (162.97%):
| 427.94 g | 15.09 oz | 0.94 lbs
239.65 g | 8.45 oz | 0.53 lbs
1.07 g | 0.04 oz | 0 lbs | 0.28 tsp | 0.09 tbsp
8.56 g | 0.3 oz | 0.02 lbs | 1.53 tsp | 0.51 tbsp
9.5 g | 0.34 oz | 0.02 lbs | 1.36 tsp | 0.45 tbsp
10.7 g | 0.38 oz | 0.02 lbs | 2.47 tsp | 0.82 tbsp
697.41 g | 24.6 oz | 1.54 lbs | TF = N/A
|
To prepare the dough, I used the new KitchenAid dough method that I have been experimenting with and described at
http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,3985.msg40412.html#msg40412 (Reply 67) . The finished dough was quite stiff, which I anticipated due to the relatively low hydration (56%) for a high-gluten flour. It also had a light tan color due to the non-diastatic barley malt syrup, which is a very dark colored syrup. The dough was cold fermented in the refrigerator for 24 hours, and then brought to room temperature to warm up—a period of about 3 hours. Once ready, the dough was shaped and stretched to 18”. The dough was moderately extensible, as I expected because of the weight of the dough and the effects of gravity, but it was of good handling quality with uniform thickness and easy to stretch out to the desired size. The skin was then dressed using amounts of sauce (8 ounces), mozzarella cheese (13 ounces, shredded), dried oregano and grated Romano cheese as recommended in the Sbarro’s article I referenced earlier in this thread. The pizza was topped with sautéed sliced mushrooms and pepperoni slices.
Since my pizza stone cannot handle an 18” pizza, I used a combination of an 18” pizza screen and my stone. I dressed the pizza on the screen and baked it at the second-from-the-top oven rack position of my oven, and once the crust firmed up and the upper crust and the cheese started to brown I shifted the pizza off of the screen onto the stone (at the lowest oven rack position), which I had preheated for about an hour at around 500-550 degrees F. The time on the screen was around 6-7 minutes, and the time on the stone was about 2 minutes.
The photos below show the finished pizza. The pizza turned out quite well, with good crust coloration and flavor. The rim was not as light and airy as I prefer but the crust did have a decent oven spring, along with a few large random bubbles. Next time, I would be inclined to increase the hydration to over 60% and, for better crust flavor, use a longer cold fermentation time, possibly 3 or more days. I think also that I would also substitute IDY for ADY and also use vegetable oil in lieu of the lard, which did not appear to me to offer clear taste or texture advantages over oil. I believe that Sbarro’s itself is now using vegetable oil.
What was really impressive is the size of the pizza itself--18”. It is a monster of a pizza compared with the others I make and really stands out from the crowd.
Peter
