Do bakers, then tend to favor the lower temperature because healthy yeast multiplication is a higher priority than a predictable fermentation?
OSK,
I wondered about that also. I think it is important to put the material I cited into context. More particularly, the materials I cited apply specifically to bread making. While there are a lot of similarities between bread making and pizza dough making, there are also several differences. For example, for bread making, the window of dough production and use tend to be quite short. As a basic example, according to a chart I found in Prof. Raymond Calvel's book,
The Taste of Bread, at page 46, the window for preparing a straight dough for French bread is about 6 hours. It is even less for a bread dough made using the improved straight dough method (4 1/2 hours) or the straight dough method with intensive mixing (4 3/4 hours). Also, the balance between gas production and gas retention is arguably more important to bread production than pizza dough production because you want a dough with good volume and forming and shaping characteristics so that the finished bread is of good shape and volume. With pizza dough, at some point it is pressed flat to form a skin that is then dressed to make a pizza. Of course, you still want a good balance between gas production and gas retention so that you get a decent oven spring and a nice rim, but arguably those effects are not as pronounced or as important as with a loaf of bread.
As you know, it is possible to make a pizza dough that can be used in a couple of hours or after several days. For example, if you use a lot of yeast and water at a temperature high enough to achieve a high finished dough temperature, you can have a pizza ready to serve in about two hours. Alternatively, at the other extreme, if you use a small amount of yeast and water at a temperature low enough to achieve a low finished dough temperature, and then promptly put the dough balls into the cooler, the dough can make it out to several days before using. In the first example, the dough experiences a rapid fermentation which may predominate over yeast multiplication, whereas in the second example, the yeast multiplication will predominate over the fermentation rate. While some people might prefer the pizza made in a couple of hours over one made a few days later, I think that most people would say that the pizza made using a dough that fermented over the course of a few days will produce a pizza that tastes better because of the increased fermentation byproducts that contribute to the taste, flavor, color, aroma and texture of the finished crust.
As I see it, what you do depends on what kind of pizza you want to make and when you want it to be ready. The first step is to find a good recipe that is balanced in the ingredients used and their quantities. By balance, I mean not using ingredients that are well out of range for the type of pizza to be made and are also in balance with respect to each other. Once that objective is achieved, it becomes a matter of adjusting the values of the ingredients, especially the yeast, and all of the applicable temperatures, including the temperature of the water and the finished dough temperature, plus any initial proofing of the dough, to produce the dough so that is ready to use when you want it.
Peter
