Hi Guys,
Just wondering if I could get some help here. I'm trying to make Peter Reinhart's Pizza Americana dough. The recipe calls for
5 cups high gluten or bread flour (I used Allinsons which has 13.9 g of protein per 100 g)
3 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons instant yeast
1/4 cup olive oil
1 cup milk
3/4 cup room temperature water
I was mixing by hand. The instructions call for 4 minutes of mixing, followed by a 5 minute rest and then 2 - 3 minutes more mixing. I tried to use my hand as much like a dough hook as possible. I take it that mixing doesn't really mean that I knead the dough?
The problem is that I find my dough to be very wet and sticky.
I let the dough proof overnight in the fridge. I took it out 2 hours before stretching to let it get to room temperature again. The first picture shows the dough just before I'm about to stretch it. It's very wet at this point and so it takes a lot of flour because it sticks to everything.
After flouring, in the second picture, it kind of wrinkles up which makes me think there's too much flour on the outside. But then when I stretch it a little bit, it becomes wet again, as you can see in picture 3. And at this point it's kind of absorbed the flour on the underside of the dough as I was stretching it and stuck itself to the table.
Aside from this, I found the dough to be very easy to stretch out and windowpane and quite resistant to me putting holes in it. But I think I have a problem with my technique because I've tried to make pizza following different formulations before and have similiar problems. I'd love suggestions! How does it look? I'm not from a baking family so I little real world experience of dough.
Luke
