Dear Tom
Thanks a ton to you and many of the members here for sharing such great information. Really appreciate it.
Some of the information below maybe relevant for the think tank boards but eventually I need advice for a dough formulation hence posting here:
Since a few months I have started a pizza delivery service. Currently we are doing only thin crust pizzas of one size.
This is the current formulation that I use along with the process
AP Flour 100%
IDY 0.9%
Bread improver 0.2%
Water 50%
Sunflower oil 3.6%
Sugar 1%
Salt 1.8%
Mixed in a dough mixer , balled and refrigerated for 12 hours to a day. Let it come to room temperature then roll by hand, cut with a stencil and parbake for 30 seconds at 390F. Cool and then dust of excess flour and refrigerate until an order comes.
A brief summary of how my oven works. It has only a 3" height as one chamber is converted to two with an extra stone and heating element. There is of course a temperature setting along with power buttons that regulate the intensity of heat from the different elements. The top power button actually control both the top and middle heating element while the bottom one controls only the bottom. Due to this I have to keep the top and bottom power settings the same. If I don't there is a difference in temperates and pizzas won't cook evenly.
I am currently using it at 572F with power settings 4 and 4. The dough formulation that i use has to be cooked on a screen because of the proximity of the stone to the respective heating element above it.
The company has a model without the extra stone but we require this particular one due to space and budget constraints. The single stone model has a much more even heat distribution and ability to cook the base directly on oven stone. Another interesting thing I have to do is circulate the screen every minute for even cooking (there are probably different temperature zones and it is not consistent hence we do this else pizza browns more on one side)
We remove the from the screen and cook for 15 seconds to get it browned and crisp. The pizza is then cooled on a word rack, boxed and delivered.
The customer response has been very good and I am not in a position where I can or should be messing with this recipe. I forgot to mention that each pie before being par baked weighs 160gms. This is for a 11inch pie. As you can imagine this is quite thin. However that being said I want to make a thicker pizza perhaps a 300gm one.
The characteristics I am looking for are soft tender bumaybe like a pan pizza. Is something like this possible in my current temperature and oven configuration ? I am willing to try multiple recipes. Am open to using pans screens etc. If par baking this sort of crust is an option i would like to try that method too. We use our kitchen for other purposes and at times counter space can become an issue.
I have tried some formulations with lower sugar, oil and higher hydration playing around with these parameters mainly and yet I have not been able to cook it directly on the stone without it burning from the bottom. Burning happens in less than two minutes.
Would love some suggestions or any hacks that I may be able to do to get what I am after without altering oven settings.
Sorry for the extremely long post but hopefully this can help someone else too
Cheers
Varun
