Upper limit on dough rising

[zandonatti]

I've been experimenting with making a batch of dough, then right into the fridge for a bulk rise of 2 or 3 days, then split up into 4 dough balls and back to the fridge, each ball in a plastic container with a lid (every couple of days I pop the lid to let the gas out.

When ready to cook, I take it out and let it come to room temp, punch it down, and let it rise again for another couple hours.

Now here's my question:  I've noticed that people talking about the need to use the dough within 5 or 6 days.  But I just finished eating a pie that had been in the fridge for 10 days, and it was delicious.  Lots of complex flavors;  I felt like eating the crust alone it was so good.  So is it that I'm getting somethng that after this long a period has aged and mellowed like an old Bordeaux, or is it just my peculiar taste for super-annuated yeasty dough?

-Zandonatti

[Bryan S]

Now here's my question:  I've noticed that people talking about the need to use the dough within 5 or 6 days.  But I just finished eating a pie that had been in the fridge for 10 days, and it was delicious.  Lots of complex flavors;  I felt like eating the crust alone it was so good.  So is it that I'm getting something that after this long a period has aged and mellowed like an old Bordeaux, or is it just my peculiar taste for super-annuated yeasty dough?

-Zandonatti

You are not alone, many of us let the dough ferment for 10+ days.  I don't degass or re knead (some do though), I just let mine alone in the fridge for 5-10+ days. I just made a pizza the other day with a 11 day old dough and it was my best crust to date. http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,5000.msg42744.html#msg42744

[Pete-zza]

Z,

What Bryan says is correct. MWTC, Glutenboy and I have also made doughs that have held out for much longer than normal. In fact, I have devoted a good part of an entire thread to that subject, with a typical post being this one for a dough that lasted 15 days: http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,3985.msg40092.html#msg40092 (Reply 57). I even made a pizza using dough that was over 20 days old, which was also discussed in the same thread, but I thought that that was too long. It was an experiment and I just wanted to see what kind of pizza a 20+ day old dough would produce. At first the crust flavors seemed OK, albeit unique in my experience, but after a day or so the crusts of the leftover slices became so strong--but not in a pleasurable way--that I threw the rest of the pizza away.

For me, creating and keeping a dough cold at just about every stage and adding the yeast (in small quantities) late in the process seems to have worked best and on a consistent basis. I have conducted quite a few experiments on the topic of geriatric dough so it is possible that other factors are also at play in extending the useful lives of doughs.

Peter

[shango]

I have never used " geriatric " dough.  To me it would make more sense to capture the flavor of old dough through and old dough addition or through the use of a sourdough culture.

What would the crumb be like on a 15 day old, slow risen, refrigerated dough?

What style of pizza would this method represent?

[Pete-zza]

Edan,

You are right. If you want to capture the flavors that come from using a natural starter or a preferment, that would be the better way to do it. Someone might not have a starter, but it would be easy enough to use a preferment, like a poolish, sponge, biga or old dough, even thought there are differences between using these preferments and the methods I have been describing to create geriatric doughs. For many, the differences may not matter, and using starters and preferments may be entirely adequate. The only advantage to a geriatric dough that I can see is that you may have better control over the time of its use, whereas preferments have to be used fairly promptly after the prefermentation period. As an example, I have a dough now sitting in my refrigerator that is 18 days old today. I haven’t used it simply because I have been using up other doughs. When I checked it this morning, I saw no indication that it is at the end of the road and has to be used.

The styles I have been making are the NY style. To get an idea as to the characteristics of a crust made from a geriatric dough, see the following posts: http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,3985.msg40092.html#msg40092 (Reply 57, 15-day dough) and http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,3985.msg42160.html#msg42160 (Reply 110, 15-day dough). If you would like to see what a pizza looks like using a 23-day old dough, see http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,3985.msg42556.html#msg42556 (Reply 117). That’s the pizza I mentioned in my last post that I ended up throwing away.

I think the trick in making a workable geriatric dough is doing things that achieve a decent oven spring, crumb and texture, nice crust coloration, and sweetness, even in the absence of using any sugar in the dough. Most standard methods have a hard time getting all of these characteristics at the same time, even after a few days. There is a certain, hard-to-understand (for me) chemistry at work. But it works.

Peter

[shango]

It's very interesting..
I will read up on this a little more when I have some spare time.

At what length of fermentation, in days, would you say has yielded the best results in flavor and texture?

I guess that this is a straight yeast, all purpose flour, salt and water recipe, or are there more ingredients?

[Pete-zza]

Edan,

It seemed to me that the best crust flavors came at around 7-8 days, but that is only a rough estimate. I'd have to reread my own stuff to refresh my memory, but the crust flavors were still good at up to 15 days. As a practical matter, I don't see much point intentionally going beyond about 10 days. That seems to be consistent with what Bryan and MWTC found.

I used different flours, but the predominant one was the King Arthur high-gluten flour which I mainly used with water, salt, instant dry yeast (I also tried ADY), and oil. As previously mentioned, I added no sugar to the doughs yet got detectable sweetness up to about 15 days, although it diminished with dough age in my experiments. I also did different experiments using different sequencing of ingredients, which I reported on at the thread with the photos of the geriatric doughs described earlier. The texture of the crust was good for just about all of the geriatric crusts. For dough formulation, I used mainly the Lehmann NY style dough formulation or some variant thereof because I know the behavior of the Lehmann dough better than most after all the experiments I have conducted using that dough as a guinea pig.

Peter

[dapizza]

Okay... Do your 10 day old doughs have a funky smell?  Today I took out a 5 day dough and plopped it on some flour and I knew I smelled something funny.  I leaned down and smelled it, and it smelled like Natural Light.    No joke!  I understand some doughs last longer than other, but what is the secret?  More sugar?  Less yeast?  Thanks.

[chiguy]

 Da pizza,
 

Okay... Do your 10 day old doughs have a funky smell?  Today I took out a 5 day dough and plopped it on some flour and I knew I smelled something funny.  I leaned down and smelled it, and it smelled like Natural Light.    No joke!  I understand some doughs last longer than other, but what is the secret?  More sugar?  Less yeast?  Thanks.

Dough temperature and yeast % is one of the most important factors when holding dough for longer periods of times.
 I would doubt friends or family will care or notice much of a difference between 3,5 or 10 days of fermentation. The guys here well thats a different story.
                                                              Chiguy

[November]

I leaned down and smelled it, and it smelled like Natural Light.

I actually judge the biochemical performance of a dough by its aroma since I have a very keen sense of smell.  If a dough smells like beer, that's actually a good thing.  That's one of the aromas I look for, and have achieved it with my best doughs in just a few hours on the bench during a 68°F rise.  The beer aroma is a result of the yeast getting all the nutrients it needs.  In most cases, commercially processed wheat flour alone is not enough to make the yeast really happy, therefore the beer aroma does not happen often for most people.  It also means that the yeast is more lively, so beer-smelling doughs will typically not last quite as long.

- red.november

[nepa-pizza-snob]

What might one add to his dough to encourage and nourish the yeast to
produce BEER aroma? I like the crispy result of my lean dough - I want the
beer smell, but typically prefer a dough that does not contain sugar or oil.
Well .5% / volume of oil is tolerable and I honestly don't know if I am a
1%er who can truly detect all these miniscule BS nuances in the finished
product anyway.

[Pete-zza]

Okay... Do your 10 day old doughs have a funky smell?  Today I took out a 5 day dough and plopped it on some flour and I knew I smelled something funny.  I leaned down and smelled it, and it smelled like Natural Light.    No joke!  I understand some doughs last longer than other, but what is the secret?  More sugar?  Less yeast?  Thanks.

dapizza,

A lot of my dough experiments have been done using a lidded metal container to store the doughs in the refrigerator. Normally, I would check them daily by removing the lid. In those instances, I could not detect any pronounced odors of fermentation. But when I sealed the doughs shut in the metal containers for several days in a row, or when I sealed a dough ball in a FoodSaver plastic storage bag for 15 days, I could definitely detect the odors of fermentation when I exposed the dough balls to the open environment. Having experienced these odors many times before, I don't deem the smells to be "funky". Maybe I did when I first experienced the odors, but that was a very long time ago.

I agree with chiguy that keeping the dough cold as much as possible, along with using small amounts of yeast, are two important contributors to dough longevity. However, it seemed to me that when I added the yeast (IDY) to the dough at the end of the dough making process, together with the salt, rather than at the beginning, the doughs seemed to have longer useful lives and with very good finished crust characteristics considering the ages of the doughs. And, for some reason, IDY seemed to work better than ADY (nonrehydrated) in terms of extending the dough's useful life. I added no sugar, so sugar was not a factor.

I also did a lot of other things up front to make a better quality dough, such as using sifted flour, the three different KitchenAid attachments, etc. Whether doing these things helped extend a dough's useful life is hard to say, but they certainly did not hurt matters. Doing these kinds of things did allow me to use hydration levels of around 65% without adversely affecting extensibility, which has long been a problem for many people with a dough like the Lehmann dough where it would be unusual to get more than 3 or 4 days without the dough becoming difficult to handle.

Peter

[Bryan S]

Okay... Do your 10 day old doughs have a funky smell?  Today I took out a 5 day dough and plopped it on some flour and I knew I smelled something funny.  I leaned down and smelled it, and it smelled like Natural Light.    No joke!  I understand some doughs last longer than other, but what is the secret?  More sugar?  Less yeast?  Thanks.

My long ferment doughs don't get a funky smell to them. I just use my standard NY pizza dough recipe. Harvest King or Ceresota AP flour, spring water, IDY and Sea Salt. I don't use oil or sugar in my NY style pizaa dough.
I make all my dough the same way. I use a KA Pro 600 with the spiral hook. I put room temp (around 68-70) spring water in the KA bowl, add salt, and IDY. I then sift the flour and after letting the yeast rehydrate for 5 min then I add the flour and mix with the spiral dough hook on speed 2 just till it comes together, less than 2 min. I then let it sit for 15 min and then  do a final knead on speed 2 for 4-5 min. I then weigh out the dough balls to 20 oz hand knead in to a smooth ball, oil and place in a gladeware round container and in to the beer fridge (34-36 degrees) it goes for the cold ferment. I get very little rise in the fridge with my dough.
 Here's my recipe for 2 - 20 oz balls for 16" pies

Flour (100%) 24.56 oz
Water (62%) 15.22 oz
IDY (0.33%) 0.76 tsp.
Salt (2%) 2.5 tsp.

 

[humpty99]

I thought it was always supposed to smell like beer.  I have been experimenting with pizza dough for about 2 years now, and I always take the lid off and smell the dough to see how its doing.  I can't remember ever not getting that smell.