WNY vs NYC

[RockyMarciano]

It's my understanding that new york style is reffering to nyc style.  I've discovered that the two regions have very different styles of pizza, in buffalo the pizza is more doughier, the sauce is sweeter and it usually has more cheese and is topped with margherita pepperoni (cup n crisp), it is very greasy, so that even the bottom of the crust is greasy.  I'm trying to figure out how to use baker's percents so I can use the same recipe at work for myself at home and tweak it a little, but I cant give away the recipe cos my boss would kill me.  But if anyone has recipes that are wny style, please share. 

[Pete-zza]

Rocky,

You should be in a pretty good position to reverse engineer the dough used at work so that you can play around with formulations at home. You can start with taking a dough ball for a corresponding size pizza and calculating the thickness factor. You already have shown that you know how to do that. Of course, you will need a scale to weigh the dough.

The next step would be to determine the remaining ingredients. I assume that you know what those ingredients are and quite possibly their quantities. Those quantities, especially if you start out with a known weight of flour, can be converted to baker's percents if they are not already in that form. If the dough at work is doughier than the typical NYC style, that suggests a thicker crust and possibly the use of a fair amount of sugar and oil, which will have the tendency to produce a soft and tender crust and crumb. If the dough is a cold fermented dough and the dough balls are kept in dough boxes and put into the cooler, the chances are pretty good that the amount of yeast is quite small. Otherwise the dough balls can expand too quickly and run into each other in the dough boxes and be harder to cool down. Since you are already familiar with the sauce, cheese and other toppings, you don't have to reinvent the wheel on those ingredients.

If there is any aspect you fell you need help with without revealing your boss' dough formulation, let me know. 

Petr

[chiguy]

 Hi Rocky,
 I admire you're loyalty to the boss, you are truly a good employee. I will give you the basic formula for calculating Bakers Percent.
          (Bakers Percent Formula)
 First off remember Flour is always equal to 100%
 Baker's Percent & How it's Done
 Divide the weight of the ingredients by the weight of the flour and multiply by 100

 Example: 40 pounds of flour and 24.8 pounds of water= 24.8 divided by 40 x 100 = 62%
 
 Example: 40 pounds of flour and 9 ounces of salt = 9 ounces divided by640                        (40x16=640oz)x100 = 1.4% OR 9 divided by 16 = .5625 divided by 40 x 100 = 1.40
 
 This is the conversion formula , remember that the ingredient weight and the flour weight must be shown in the same weight units( ounces, grams, pounds).
 Now lets try a smaller recipe with a hypothetical formula 100%Flour,62%Water,1.5%Salt,2%Sugar,3%Oil, and 0.4%IDY.
 Using a calculator
 We will make a dough based on 2lb Of Flour converted to 32ouncesFlour 100% (you can decide you're own flour amount when needed).
 Water 62%: 32 x 62 press"%"= 19.84oz
 Salt 1.5%:   32 x 1.5 press"%"= 0.48oz
 Sugar 2%:   32 x 2    press"%"= 0.64oz
 Oil      3%:   32 x 3    press"%"= 0.96oz
 IDY  0.4%:   32 x 0.4 press"%"=0.128oz
 
After i started writing out this example i realize it may have been better to use grams in this instance. I hope you're scale can convert,i hope you have a scale for that matter. If you plan on using Bakers % at home you will need one. i hope this is clear enough and advise you to plug in a few numbers to get the hang of it. i also hope my math is correct.
                                                                                                             Chiguy

[RockyMarciano]

thanks for the help guys.  I want to reverse engineer the other pizzeria's in the city.  I mean blasdell pizza has the best crust, carbone's has the best sauce, and lovejoy's has the best cheese.  Now if I could combine them all and make a super pizza, well then i would have something.  I could easily figure out what i make at work, cos i make the pizza's there, but i want to get a recipe from some of the other places, but i though i would just start with ours and go from there, i can't share our recipes, so i was hoping to find someone elses or my own.  You know because when you eat at your work all the time you want to try something different.  The only place that has a website is carbone's http://www.carbonespizza.com/

[Pete-zza]

The other day I saw a new thread at the PMQ.com Think Tank website relating to the Buffalo NY style, at http://www.pmq.com/cgi-bin/tt/index.cgi/noframes/read/26994.

Peter

[RockyMarciano]

someone must of saw this thread and posted it, cool.

[RockyMarciano]

 According to that guy's recipe and what you have tought me petezza:

16" wny dough

100%, Flour , 13.28 oz.  3 1/3c
58%, Water, 8oz.,  1 c.
2% Sugar  .266 oz  ~2 t
1.25%, Salt, 0.166 oz.,  ~1  t.
0.5%, fresh yeast, 0.066  ~1/3 t.
1%, Oil, 0.13 oz. (, between 3/4 and 7/8 t.
Total Dough weight = 21.9076 oz.
Thickness factor = 0.1090147


It also called for 2.875%,  .3818 oz of dough conditioner, but i left that out

[Pete-zza]

Rocky,

You done good  . I'm impressed. I am willing to bet that you are the only 19-year old in WNY, maybe even the nation, who can do what you did with the baker's percents  .

If I had to guess, the dough conditioner is probably PZ-44, which is used to make high-gluten doughs less elastic and easier to form and shape. For a properly fermented dough, I don't see any need to use it. I couldn't even if I wanted to. It comes in a 50-lb. bag. To be a bit technical, to compensate for the dough conditioner, you could increase the amount of yeast and water so long as the baker's percent for the water remains about the same. The amounts are so small that I don't know that I would bother.

I don't work with fresh yeast like you do, so I have never tried to convert it to teaspoons or fractions thereof. Since it is a wet yeast, it's hard to convert to spoon size anyway. I estimate that the amount in your formulation is about 1/10 of one of those little cubes sold in the supermarket.

If you try the formulation out, please let us know how it turns out.

Peter

[RockyMarciano]

the oz's are dead on but the measuring spoons are estimated.   It pretty much just comes down to punching numbers in a calculator.  They say the yeast doesn't matter, but I think it does, but for small scale I don't think it does.  The fresh yeast, is well fresh, and I know from brewing wine and beer that different yeasts will give different tastes.  As well as rise times.

[RockyMarciano]

16" wny dough

100%, Flour , 13.28 oz.         
58%, Water, 8oz.,                 
2% Sugar  .266 oz                 
1.25%, Salt, 0.166 oz.,         
0.5%,fresh yeast,  0.066       
1%, Oil, 0.13 oz.                     

Total Dough weight = 21.9076 oz.
Thickness factor = 0.1090147




Rocky's 16-inch Lehmann NY Style Dough Formulation
100%, Flour (high-gluten or bread), 13.28 oz.   
63%, Water, 8.36 oz.                                         
1.75%, Salt, 0.23 oz.                                         
0.25%, Instant dry yeast (IDY), 0.03 oz.           
1%, Oil, 0.13 oz.                                                 
Total Dough weight = 22.02 oz.
Thickness factor = 0.1095

Petezza's lehmann 16"

       High-gluten flour, 11.80 oz.   
       Water, 7.70 oz.                     
       IDY, 0.20 oz.                         
       Salt, 0.20 oz.                         
       Olive oil (light), 0.12 oz.       
      Thickness factor (TF) = 0.10


Im going to try both those recipes tommorow, and tell ya how it goes petezza.   I bought some san marzanos, though they are grown in the USA (i was using cento crushed tomatoes which I thought are pretty good, but ill give these SM's a try), and got the KA flour and fleschmanns ADY.   DAMNIT!!! I tried converting oz to tsp's and cups then I relized if I have 13.28oz of flour would equal 1 2/3 cups, but thats way too less, something must be wrong.  Help petezza!!!!

[Pete-zza]

Rocky,

The way I weigh out flour, the 13.28 oz. of flour comes to 3 cups and 2 tablespoons. To get close to the same volume of flour, you should first stir the flour in the flour bag to loosen it up a bit, then use an ordinary kitchen tablespoon to scoop flour from the bag into your one-cup measuring cup until it is slightly overflowing, and then level off the top of the measuring cup with the flat edge of a knife. Don't shake the measuring cup or bang it on a surface to cause the flour to settle. I also use level (not heaping) tablespoons for the 2 tablespoons of flour mentioned above. Following these steps should get you fairly close to 13.28 ounces. I used high-gluten flour to do the measuring. If you are using bread flour and aren't using a scale, it might vary slightly.

If you plan to use ADY instead of IDY, you will need to use more ADY on a volume basis (50 percent more, by volume) and proof it in a bit of the total water, at around 105-115 degrees F, for about 10 minutes, and then add it to the remaining water, which should be on the cool side.

Good luck.

Peter

[AKSteve]

The Pete-zza's Lehmann recipe that you posted is the one where he made a mistake and used too much yeast. I think he said it was 10x too much. I mistakenly just made a batch of that dough using that same amount of yeast, so hopefully it'll turn out all right. I wanted to make 3 pizza's so I tripled the recipe. In grams, it was 1003g of flour to 17g of yeast. Since there's so much yeast in it, I think I'll just cook the pizza's tonight instead of letting the dough sit in the fridge for a couple of days like I usually do.

Steve

[Pete-zza]

AKSteve,

Thanks for pointing that out. I missed it when I was responding to Rocky's last post. I had referred the readers of the original post to a later post for the proper amount of yeast, but apparently the note is sometimes missed or the note wasn't clear enough without reading subsequent posts. As it turned out, I liked the higher yeast version of the Lehmann dough a lot. I decided to go back to the original formulation and yeast amount since the assignment I accepted from Steve was to try out the basic Lehmann dough recipe, not to immediately change it. The formulation will work with greater amounts of yeast, but that wouldn't be the approach that a professional pizza operator would want to use because the dough would rise too fast and create dough management problems. In a home setting, it's not a real issue. However, one wouldn't want to go several days before using the dough.

Peter

[RockyMarciano]

Petezza, what about the salt, sugar, yeast, and oil.  How many tsp's do they come to??  Is my only option to buy a scale? Thats 50 bucks i don't have.

[Pete-zza]

Rocky,

A scale wouldn't be of much help to you with the small, lightweight ingredients like salt, yeast, oil, etc. The scale would help you most with weighing the flour and water. Here is what you are asking for:

Rocky's 16-inch Lehmann NY Style Dough Formulation
100%, Flour (high-gluten or bread), 13.28 oz.   
63%, Water, 8.36 oz.                                         
1.75%, Salt, 0.23 oz., a bit less than 1 1/4 t.                                       
0.25%, Instant dry yeast (IDY), 0.03 oz., a bit less than 1/3 t.         
1%, Oil, 0.13 oz., a bit more than 7/8 t.                                                 
Total Dough weight = 22.02 oz.
Thickness factor = 0.1095

Pete-zza's Lehmann 16"
High-gluten flour, 11.80 oz.   
Water, 7.70 oz.                     
IDY, 0.02 oz., 1/8 t. plus one half of 1/8 t. (a total of about 3/16 t.)                 
Salt, 0.20 oz., 1 t.                       
Olive oil (light), 0.12 oz., a bit less than 3/4 t.     
Thickness factor (TF) = 0.10

You will note that I corrected the amount of yeast in the Lehmann recipe. Remember also that the Lehmann 16-inch recipe you chose uses a high hydration (around 65%), so unless you are using high-gluten flour you may have to adjust the water/flour ratio.

Peter

[RockyMarciano]

 16" wny dough

100%, Flour , 13.28 oz.         
58%, Water, 8oz.,                 
2% Sugar  .266 oz                 
1.25%, Salt, 0.166 oz.,         
0.5%,fresh yeast,  0.066       
1%, Oil, 0.13 oz.                     

Total Dough weight = 21.9076 oz.
Thickness factor = 0.1090147


I wanted to try this recipe for the weekend, how are you converting those amounts?

[Pete-zza]

This way:

16" wny dough

100%, Flour, 13.28 oz.         
58%, Water, 8 oz.                 
2% Sugar  .266 oz., just under 2 t.               
1.25%, Salt, 0.166 oz., a bit less than 7/8 t.       
0.5%, Fresh yeast, 0.066, a bit more than 1/10 of a 0.6 oz. cube
1%, Oil, 0.13 oz., 7/8 t.   

Peter

[itsinthesauce]

Peter, that's the shortest post in your history....you okay? Just kidding, keep up the good work.

[Pete-zza]

Sometimes I even surprise myself .

Peter

[RockyMarciano]

I made both recipes today, and they are in the fridge, i'll take them out tommorow and tell ya how it goes.