Lehmann Dough Calculator

[Steve]

I recently added a new feature to the website. The feature is called the “Lehmann Pizza Dough Calculating Tool”.

http://www.pizzamaking.com/dough_calculator.html

The tool was developed by one of our new members, Boy Hits Car (Mike), and can be used to determine the ingredients and quantities needed to make any size and number (up to 99) of dough balls using the standard Lehmann dough formulation. A key advantage of the tool is that it can be accessed and used online. No spreadsheet is required. To the best of my knowledge, no other forum or pizza-related site offers such a tool.

To use the tool, all that is required is to enter the number of dough balls desired, the pizza size, thickness factor, and baker’s percents. The tool offers guidance as to recommended values for all of the inputted data. Three salt choices (regular, fine sea salt, and Kosher) and three yeast choices (ADY, IDY and cake) are offered. Once all of the values have been entered, the total ingredient list will be produced. Any value entered into the tool can be changed or corrected at any time and the results will adapt to the changes and appear in essentially real time. Except for flour, water and cake yeast, which are difficult to convert to volume measurements, volume measurements are provided for all the ingredients, along with weight measurements in metric and standard U.S. form.

In using the tool, ordinary baker's percents should be used, without any leading 0s. For example, if the hydration percent is 62%, it should be entered into the applicable field in the tool as the number 62, not 062. Otherwise, the results will be incorrect.

For those who are interested, for a round pizza with a radius R, the TF equals the weight of the desired dough ball divided by Pi (3.14159) x R²; for a rectangular/square pizza with length and width dimensions L x W, the TF equals the weight of the dough ball divided by L x W.

The tool also includes a “Notes” box by which the user can enter comments and notes about a particular dough formulation. The notes can be entered online or, if preferred, on a printed hard copy. The tool also allows for the ingredients section to be copied and pasted into another document, including posts on the forum. If a hard copy of the results is desired, the print command found under the File menu on the browser can be used, much like one would use to print from any website. If for any reason a printing problem arises, the mouse/cursor can be moved anywhere over the tool and "right" clicked. A menu will appear with an option to print. Click on Print and that should rectify any print problems.

Although the tool was specifically developed for the Lehmann dough formulation, it can also be used for any dough formulation using the same ingredients as the Lehmann formulation and for which there are baker’s percents and thickness factors. Over time, quite a few of such formulations have been posted on the forum, including the Ostrander “Old Faithful” dough formulations, many Neapolitan dough formulations, Pizza Raquel (IDY-only version), several “few-hours” dough formulations (including my “quick & easy” NY dough formulation), and the Canadave NY style dough formulation, among others. It is anticipated that a generic dough formulating tool will soon be developed and hosted on the forum that will go beyond the Lehmann dough formulation and allow for even more ingredient choices and options.

I’d like to thank Mike for all his work in developing the Lehmann tool and for offering to have it hosted on the forum. I think you will be impressed with the tool and its ease of use, speed, convenience and capabilities. I invite any comments and suggestions for improving the tool to make it even better.

Steve

[Boy Hits Car]

Hey everyone,

I hope the forum finds the tool useful.

I just wanted to add a note about printing.  Since I wasn't sure how Steve would implement the tool into the design of the forum website, I gave him printing instructions that directed users to use the Print function under the File menu.  Now that I see how he as introduced and integrated it into the site, it would be advised not to print in that manner.  Using the File menu's print command will print the whole web page including all the site's graphics and might split the tool into two pages.  It is better to move your cursor over the tool and right click.  A menu will appear with a Print command.  Click on Print and the tool, with your custom ingredients, will print on one page without the site's graphics.  This will save you ink and paper as well as give you a much cleaner copy of the ingredients.

I'd also like to acknowledge Peter's (aka Pete-zza) contribution to the tool.  I couldn't have completed it without his knowledge of all the math equations necessary for the Lehmann formula.  He spent a lot of time answering questions on how to calculate all the various weights and measures.

Please post any technical problems you might encounter and feel free to comment on the tool.  Any opinions on changes or modifications would be appreciated.

Mike

[abc]

I LOVE IT

[Steve]

Yes, thanks Mike and Peter!! 

[scott r]

Just used it.  So easy,  a dream.  THANKS GUYS!!

[Pete-zza]

Thanks, Mike, for the work you put into creating the tool and thanks, Steve, for hosting it on the forum.

I have already included a link to the tool in the Lehmann Roadmap, and tonight I used the tool to come up with an ingredients list for a Neapolitan style dough. I copied and pasted the list right into a post.

A tool like this is a liberating tool. You don't have to create or hunt down a spreadsheet to get the answers or laboriously reenter data to make changes or worry about the spreadsheet crashing because of its sensitivity. All you need is the baker's percents and a thickness factor to get things started, and these are usually available where the dough formulations were posted. And, best of all, it is an online tool that can be accessed easily and at any time and from any place where there is Internet access. Hopefully the tool will lead to more experimentation and new and better formulations.

I'd be happy to work with Mike on the generic tool and invite our members to tell us which additional ingredients are of interest. I already have conversion data for things like honey/barley malt syrup, vital wheat gluten, nonfat dry milk, dried dairy whey, Crisco, semolina, and a few others. Usually, only one or two of these are used beyond the basic flour, water, yeast, salt, sugar and oil.

Peter

[scott r]

I know it would be tricky, but I would love it if you could include sourdough culture in with the yeast.  It would probably make the most sense to base it on a starter made with 50/50 water to flour.

[Pete-zza]

scott,

Of all the suggestions I was looking for, the one I was least hoping to get is yours .

The possibility of including a preferment for the Lehmann calculating tool was not considered because it was not part of the original dough formulation even though I and others have used preferments with that formulation. However, for the expanded version of the dough calculating tool, it may be feasible to consider the preferment as an "Other" ingredient. This is what I used to do with my spreadsheet, although I had to "trick" it to get the desired results because my spreadsheet was not originally designed to handle starters.

If the starter is a 50/50 flour/water starter, by weight, as you mentioned, it should be possible to adjust the flour and water in the dough formulation to reflect the starter. For example, if the amount of starter used weighs say, one ounce, one-half ounce could be subtracted from the formula flour and one-half ounce could be subtracted form the formula water. That way, the dough ball weight would remain the same. Another approach would be to treat the starter as a completely separate ingredient and just add the starter amount to the other weights without adjusting the formula flour and water or any of the other ingredients. This approach would increase the weight of the dough by the weight of the starter, but for a single or few dough balls using normal amounts of starter, the added weight should be small. I'm not sure at this point what would be the best way to proceed if a large amount of starter were to be used. My recollection is that some members use upwards of 40%. At those levels, the doughs using both methods would be different and most likely would produce different results. To work correctly, I think we would need proper baker's percents and the appropriate thickness factor.

My recollection also is that you frequently use both a starter and commercial yeast. In that case, the starter could be treated as an "Other" ingredient so that the dough calculating tool allows use of both the starter and the commercial yeast in performing the calculations.

Obviously, Mike and I will have to work these issues through when we put pencil to paper, but the above reflects my thinking as of the moment.

Peter

[enchant]

If possible, perhaps a useful addition would be a checkbox after the number-of-pizzas and pizza-size fields to enter some "average" values for the remainder of the input fields for those who are simply looking for a sensible starting point.

[Pete-zza]

Pat,

If I understand your suggestion correctly, you are asking that certain default values be automatically entered into the calculator tool by clicking on a checkbox. For example, the default values could be the following:

Thickness factor (TF) = 0.10
Water, 63%
Salt (regular), 1.75%
IDY, 0.25%
Oil, 1%
Sugar, 0%

If that is what you have in mind, I don't know if Mike's tool can be modified to do that, but he may know. An alternative solution might be to put a box to the right of the tool, if space permits, to actually give the default values. Then, two default values for salt and three default values for yeast could be specified, not just for regular salt and IDY. Of course, in that case users would have to enter the values manually.

Peter

[scott r]

Peter, I never use commercial yeast and a starter together based on marcos comments that the commercial yeast will degrade the flavor of the wild yeast.  It also makes it so that my fermentation moves along a little faster than I would like, forcing me to use refrigeration or ice water which I try to avoid for a number of reasons.  Lucky for me I am also always using very small amounts of starter culture for my pizza dough, so maybe your calculator could be modified to would work for me. 

Mike and Peter, I want to wholeheartedly thank both of you for all your hard work.

[Pete-zza]

scott,

Thanks for clarifying things. However, there are several members who do use both, so it may make sense to include both if that can be done with Mike's tool.

Peter

[enchant]

Peter,

Yes, that's exactly what I had in mind.

[Boy Hits Car]

If possible, perhaps a useful addition would be a checkbox after the number-of-pizzas and pizza-size fields to enter some "average" values for the remainder of the input fields for those who are simply looking for a sensible starting point.

Enchant,

Thanks for the idea.  Seems very reasonable.  One of the reasons I made this tool was so that beginners could get down and dirty and start experimenting.  Adding check boxes wouldn't be difficult to do.  I just wonder if it wouldn't be redundant, since there are suggestions on what to enter for each item.  I could see the check boxes as a way to make it speedier, perhaps.

The original idea I had was to force a new user to slowly enter in the data and force them to read the "suggestions."  This way a new user would have a quick tutorial, for lack of a better word, on pizza dough and baker's percents.  However, I'm not opposed to the check boxes.  I could see a new user being a tad reluctant to use the tool with so many options overwhelming them.

Mike

[enchant]

The original idea I had was to force a new user to slowly enter in the data and force them to read the "suggestions."

Ahh - so there's a method to your madness!

It's true - the suggestions do make it easier.

GREAT tool!

[Boy Hits Car]

I updated the tool to have a print button on the bottom of the tool.  That should make things a little easier.

Mike

[Park.Pizza]

  Fantastic tool, great job.

[Pete-zza]

Perhaps the most mysterious part of the new dough calculating tool is the thickness factor, TF. I thought it might be useful to try to demystify that component of the tool.

By way of background, the thickness factor is somewhat of a fiction. Tom Lehmann sometimes refers to the thickness factor as a "loading" factor in that it attempts to correlate the surface area of a pizza that is made from a given weight of dough (dough ball) and the size of the pizza made from the dough. Simply stated, the thickness factor is computed by using the following basic expression:

                            TF = [DW/(3.14 x R x R)],

where DW is the weight of a given dough ball, in ounces, and R is the radius, in inches, of the pizza (diameter divided by 2) to be made using that dough ball. The surface area of the pizza (or skin) is calculated by multiplying 3.14 (Pi) times the radius R squared, and is the part of the expression that is shown in parentheses above. (The dough calculator actually uses the more accurate value of 3.14159 for Pi.)

The thickness factor does not attempt to take into account whether the rim of the pizza is big or small. So, essentially, the thickness factor averages things out. Quite likely, it was experimentation with thickness factors that took rim size into account.

Over the course of converting many of the recipes posted on the forum (and some not posted on the forum) to baker's percents and calculating thickness factors, I have come up with the following table of typical thickness values:

Thin crust: 0.10
Lehmann crust: 0.10-0.105
Medium crust: 0.11
Thick crust: 0.12-0.13
Pizza Raquel crust: 0.07-0.08
Neapolitan 1 crust: 0.07 (for high-temperature applications)
Neapolitan 2 crust: 0.093-0.11 (for home oven applications, e.g., A16 clones)
"Elite" NY crust thickness: 0.07-0.085
Thin cracker-type crust: 0.05-0.08

Even within a particular crust style, there can be fairly wide variations. For example, for Canadave's NY style dough recipe I calculated a thickness factor of 0.137, which is quite close to the value of thickness factor I calculated for the Gemignani/Morgan NY style. That number tells us that the crusts for Canadave's pizza and the Gemignani/Morgan pizza will be on the thick side. For Big Dave Ostrander's "Old Faithful"/"New Faithful" recipes, which are considered NY styles on our forum, I calculated a thickness factor of 0.11, which would be considered medium from the above table. Similarly, for Steve's "quick & easy" NY style, I calculated a thickness factor of 0.091, which places it somewhere between an "elite" style and a typical NY street style.

What the above variations tell us is that you can choose a thickness factor that comes closest to what you want to achieve in your finished pizza. And it allows you to experiment at will with different pizza dough/crust thicknesses. In changing the thickness factor for purposes of the dough calculator, there is no need to change the baker's percents used in the dough calculator for the recipe in question. Unless the weights or volumes of a given recipe are changed (which will change the baker's percents), the baker's percents used in the dough calculating tool remain the same. So, for example, if one wishes to make a "thin" version of say, Canadave's NY style, all that is necessary is to use a lower value of thickness factor. The baker's percents remain the same. The only other variables in this case besides the thickness factor would be the pizza size and desired number of dough balls.

So, users of the tool should feel free to change the thickness factor to meet particular needs or even to experiment to find that "perfect" personal value. In so doing, the table set forth above should serve to guide the selection of thickness values. But even when the "perfect" thickness value is achieved, the tool has great value in doing all the number crunching and conversions for any desired pizza size and numbers of dough balls. Right now, the tool is limited to a maximum of 99 dough balls, but it is anticipated that that number can be made much larger in a later version of the tool, in which case it might be of value to professionals who make hundreds of dough balls. 

Peter

[David]

I was just running some calculations this minute and came up with a TF of 0.071 for my particular imput !
I knew I  should have waited for your elaboration Peter!

[David]

Great tool ,and BTW Thanks for all the work that has gone into this.Is a Palm version in the pipeline?