Norma,
I have several thoughts and comments to offer this morning.
First, all of your recent Detroit style clone pizzas using the dough balls with the 75% hydration value turned out very well judging from the photos. However, you indicated to Gene in a recent post that you do not intend to use the 75% hydration in future efforts. Also, you and Steve seemed to be pleased with the results using the higher hydration. Do you think that you will go back to the lower hydration value as you told Gene or will you try the 75% hydration value again, even if only for test purposes? Either way, I think we established that subjecting the dough to a good knead and giving it a rest before finishing (our version of "double kneading") works quite well even at high hydration values. None of this is to suggest that Buddy's uses a very high hydration value, but it does tell us that high hydration values are not an insurmountable problem in a commercial setting, even when the dough preparation function is delegated to relatively unskilled workers. FYI, the spacing of the poppy seeds that you showed in one of your recent posts suggests an increase in the volume of the dough of over 300 percent, or more than a tripling.
Second, on the matter of the use of sugar in a Detroit style dough, there is nothing particularly magical about such use. However, it is possible that sugar in the dough helps with color development for a crust that is based on an "emergency" dough where there has been insufficient time for natural sugars to be released from the flour to contribute to crust color development. In that case, the crust color contribution would be through caramelization rather than through Maillard reactions. In your case, with an overnight fermentation, you perhaps end up with enough residual sugars, along with the effects of the oil in the pan to "fry" the crust, to have good final crust coloration.
Third, for your information, Shawn Randazzo is a member of our forum. He has never posted (even an introductory post) and he has spent little time on the forum. I happened to see him online a while back (maybe within the past two months) but he left shortly thereafter.
Fourth, on the matter of whether Buddy's does or does not use salt in its dough does not really matter at this point. However, I will add that often nutritional information is incorrect or inaccurate, and there is very little that anyone, even the FDA, can do about it. For example, about a year or two ago, the GAO (Government Accountability Office) looked at the Nutrition Facts for several packaged products and found that 24% of them were incorrect or inaccurate. Of course, as you know from the analysis of the Nutrition Facts that we conducted for the Pepe's frozen dough, errors do occur. Also, a few years ago I informed Home Run Inn of an error in their Nutrition Facts, which they later corrected.
To add to the above, there is also a so-called 20% rule that allows the information given in Nutrition Facts for packaged goods sold at retail to be off by as much as 20% in either direction. Regrettably, the FDA does not have the resources to investigate Nutrition Facts, even those questionable cases brought to its attention, and not life threatening or patently false or misleading, to ensure accuracy or correctness of Nutrition Facts. So, food preparers police their own activities. I should also mention that pizza operators--such as Buddy's, or Jet's, or Mellow Mushroom, or Papa Gino's, or even Domino's--usually do not produce "Nutrition Facts" as such. Rather, they provide the same type of nutrition information as is contained in Nutrition Facts, using the same methodology, but label their nutrition information as "Nutrition" or "Nutrition Guide", and the like. Out of curiosity, I applied the 20% rule to the Buddy's Sodium numbers for a slice of one of their square pizzas, and found that increasing the amount of Sodium by 20% is tantamount to adding a bit over 1/8 teaspoon of salt to four slices of a Buddy's cheese pizza. That is only about 0.05% salt. Of course, no matter what errors or incorrect information may reside in Buddy's nutrition information, it is all moot if there is no one to enforce any errors or incorrect numbers.
Peter
