Same Day Dough?

[peetzabone]

I only figured out this morning that tonight is pizza night    so I won't be able to do a longer fermentation.. I made dough at about 8am and will probably be cooking the pizzas at 8pm.

I thought I'd just leave it out of the fridge completely to do a rise.. keeping a moist towel above it and keep the whole bowl covered in plastic. 

Would you advise to spend some time in the chiller anyway to slow down fermentation? Our house is a cool 65 dF today (much to my wife's irritation) and it's fairly humid (midwest).

Whichever you would have done- would you have broken the dough into dough balls before this rest period? If so - why?

Today's dough recipe (I had to wing it a bit so I don't know what sort of pie this will make but I was trying to do a NY style, not a Neo) - also I did ounces instead of grams this time:

12 ounces of KA bread flour
18 ounces Gold Medal AP Unbleached
.6 oz Salt
.5 oz olive oil
.25 oz honey
.75 oz IDY
20 ounces water

Would my hydration be 62% here?  If so - it seemed VERY wet and I had to finish my hand knead (after fighting the stupid dough hook in my Kitchen Aid) with bench flour (which obviously reduced my hydration even more).  Would 100% high protein flour help raise the hydration percentage? I have no idea how I would have worked more water into this dough!

Thanks in advance for any advice.

[Pete-zza]

peetszabone,

Your hydration starting out before you added more flour was 20/(18 + 12) = 66.67%. Had you used all bread flour, the hydration value would have been the same but you would have needed a bit less bench flour.

With 0.75 oz of IDY, the percent is 0.75/30 = 2.5%. That is an amount that is multiples of what you would need to make the dough in the timeframe you mentioned. At that amount, it will cause the dough to rise very quickly--many hours before you plan to use the dough--even at a room temperature of 65 degrees F. So, you should put the dough in the refrigerator promptly and remove it an hour or two before using to warm up before making the pizzas. If you can, you should do the dough division as soon as possible, even before refrigerating if that is possible. Otherwise, the gluten structure may tighten up and make the dough balls hard to open up to form skins.

Please let us know how things turn out.

Peter

[peetzabone]

Okay.. so that was funny.. when I read your response, Peet-zza, I felt like Sir Bedemir trying to explain to King Arthur that they were going to jump out of the

Trojan Rabbit

*after* the Rabbit had already been rolled into the castle.

So... I ran upstairs and chilled the dough (after separating into dough balls). I brought them back out only about 20 mins before use.. and they worked okay. They stretched more easily than usually.. didn't tear too bad.. had an unremarkable flavor and made decent pizzas. A solid B- effort I suppose.

Thanks for coaching on hydration.. makes sense now. I wanted a more hydrated dough than I usually do because my new house has a crap oven that only runs to 525dF. I knew my cook times were going to increase and I thought more moisture might help.

I also remembered you'd already sent me a note earlier in life about higher protein / gluten flours having higher absorption properties. Sorry I'd forgotten.