Norma,
I'm trying various flours. AP was good, then one of my customers gave me some All Trumps to try, which I did not like as much. I also tried Italian Caputo 00 (in the red bag, available in 1kg. bags in NYC), which I liked, but it costs significantly more than American flour. Tonight, I am trying Gold Medal Better for Bread, which I've liked for other pizzas and I wrote to General Mills to see if Better for Bread is available in 50 lb bags, wholesale. One recipe I read on another site (http://goo.gl/zA4Tk) said, "bread flour (for a crispier crust) or all purpose flour (for a chewier crust)," so I think it will boil down to one or the other. I have no particular preference yet for AP, but if I go with bread flour, then I'm pretty sure I'll want Better for Bread (or its 50 lb bag wholesale brand name if it's different). If I can remember, I'll let you know when I've decided.
By the way, I tried the recipe I linked to above and thought it was pretty good and the one-hour rise was certainly convenient.
Regarding your dough recipe, sometimes recipes go through several iterations until someone comes up with "the" recipe, and there are 66 pages on this thread! Are you using the recipe in the first post...
8.8 ounces flour
6 ¼ ounces water
½ teaspoon IDY
1 teaspoon salt
... or is there some later version? Also, in the first post, you mention using Kyrol flour, but I understand that you now use Occident. Is Occident an AP flour or a bread flour?
Gene
Gene,
To answer your question about the recipe, there is no single recipe. How I arrived at where I am today took a few months of an evolving process. The reason for that is because of my unique situation at market. I have spoken about this before on the forum but since you may not have read about it, I am only allowed access to market on weekdays, starting at 8:00AM. I cannot go there or do anything there on weekends. I sell pizzas only on Tuesdays. Any pizza I sell at market has to be made using dough that was made at market, not outside. I can make experimental doughs at home and bring them to market and make pizzas out of them, as I have done on many occasions, but I cannot sell them. To complicate matters further, my stand is exposed to the elements. As a result, ambient temperatures over the course of a year can be from about 40 degrees to over 90 degrees. Because of this, I have had to learn how best to use my refrigerator, deli case and my humidity and temperature controlled Hatco unit to figure out how to keep the dough usable over the course of the day. As a practical matter, all of the above has meant that I have to make my dough on a Friday, the following Monday or the following Tuesday when I sell pizzas.
When Peter and I felt that we had come up with a credible Buddy's clone dough, which is an "emergency" dough that can be made at room temperature and used in a few hours, I came to the conclusion that I wouldn't be able to easily use that dough at market since that would mean that I would have to get up really early in the morning to go to market and make the dough so that it would be usable about mid morning to make pizzas when customers would start placing orders. I also wasn't sure that I would be able to manage the dough so that it would hold out for most of the day. All of this led to a bunch of experiments to come up with a cold fermentation version of the Buddy's clone dough where the fermentation takes place overnight or up to 100 hours. Peter helped me with all of the experiments because I am not good at math and he knows how to change recipes to have them fit my particular situation. I did not post each recipe I used since in most cases the changes from one dough to another were minor, such as changing the amount of yeast, omitting salt (Peter thinks that there may be no salt in Buddy's dough), or changing the methods of making the dough or handling it. I am still trying to figure out a recipe that will be reliable enough to use at market.
There were so many recipes and so many changes in what I did that even I have a hard time remembering them all and hunting them down when I forget some of things I did or when other members ask me questions. What I usually do is to use the forum's search features. For example, if I want to find something that is on this thread, I use the search box at the top of the page (any page) of this thread. That almost always works but if not, I use the advanced search feature. Peter even made a thread on this subject and made it a sticky for members to refer to, including new members who are asked to read it when they become members. That thread is at
http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,3101.0.html. If you plan to do much on the Detroit style of pizza for a future business, you may want to use the forum's search features. If you can't find what you are looking for, then you might raise the questions. However, I think that at some point you may want to read this entire thread and also the Buddy's thread, as painful and time consuming as that might be. There is very little that has not been covered in those two threads about the Buddy's dough and pizzas. You might even find something that will work for your planned business or give you something to start with.
The Occident flour you asked about is a bleached and bromated flour that is from Conagra. It has a protein content of 12.2% (Buddy's told me that). That is somewhere between an all-purpose flour and a bread flour. The Kyrol flour is a high gluten flour with a much higher protein content. We don't know if Buddy's is using the Occident flour, only that the flour that they are using is bromated and has a protein content of 12.2%.
This is what I am currently using for a formulation for a Buddy‘s clone dough for a one day cold ferment.
TF 0.1218
Flour 100% Occident bromated
Hydration 71.023%
IDY 0.80%
Salt 1.75% Kosher salt
Bowl residue compensation 2.0%
A final dough temperature is about around 75 degrees F.
9.5 ounces dough ball for a 4-square steel pan
19 ounces dough ball for a 8-square steel pan
Norma
