Dave,
Thanks for the additional information.
I agree with the others that your hydration may too high for the all-purpose and Caputo 00 flours. The rated hydration for a typical all-purpose flour, such as the King Arthur all-purpose flour, is about 61%, and for the Caputo 00 Pizzeria flour it is about 55-57%. With that combination, you might want to use around 60% hydration to start and go from there. In the old days, the master elite pizza makers in NYC apparently used all-purpose flour with a hydration of 65%. However, that was before refrigeration was invented for the most part, so their doughs weren’t exposed to long fermentation times that could make them highly extensible. The dough balls were used the same day they were made. Although they didn’t use weight measurements at the time, or calculate things like thickness factors, the thickness factors I calculated based on information that Evelyne Sloman gave me were in the range of 0.06-0.09 depending on the weight of dough ball and the pizza sizes they made.
For a NY elite style, you might use high-gluten flour alone, or possibly in combination with the Caputo 00 Pizzeria flour if you like the flavor that the Caputo flour gives to the finished crust. In lieu of the high-gluten flour, you can also use a good bread flour, as scott r noted. Bread flour will give you a slightly softer crust texture because it has less protein than a high-gluten flour. The finished crust might be a bit lighter although that can be made up for by a longer bake.
What scott r says about the DiFara dough is correct, although Dom DeMarco uses only a roughly 2-hour room temperature fermentation for his dough (the dough balls are kept nice and cozy and warm in the bottom drawer of his oven). The last I heard, Dom was using the All Trumps high-gluten flour along with a brand of 00 flour that appears to change from to time. If you use a dough like Dom’s but give it a few days of cold fermentation, you should end up with a better dough than his.
One of the hardest things to achieve in a pizza is a nice crispy outer crust with decent chew but a soft and tender interior. One of the few ways that comes to mind to achieve that result, and it may not be practical for a commercial pizza operation, is to let the skin proof for a while after it has been made. That should create an insulator effect in the dough and permit a longer bake time while retaining a chewy character to the crust along with crispiness on the bottom. But if the crust is too thin, you may not get the desired softness of the crumb. As a test, you may want to try using a thickness factor of around 0.105 to see if that gets you headed in the right direction. But you won’t have an elite style with that value. You can get increased tenderness using sugar and oil, either alone or in combination, but with the sugar you run the risk of the pizzas burning on the bottom. But using either sugar or oil also takes you away from the elite style, at least the original elite style.
Once you go professional, you will not be able to use elaborate dough making schemes like Jeff’s. You will most likely be hiring people who do not have the skill set for that type of dough preparation. So, your final dough formulation should be one that can be executed using Hobart or similar commercial mixers. You will also want to use cross-stacking and down-stacking of trays of dough balls, or covered rack systems, or stacked metal dough proofing boxes like you now appear to be using.
I don’t see any problems with the ovens you plan to use. You will have to develop your dough formulation to work with those ovens but that doesn’t appear to be a big obstacle to me. In fact, if you can get the oven hot enough you may be able to bake your pizzas faster and get the desired crispiness without the interior drying out too fast.
Peter
