scott123,
I agree with everything you said in relation to the Calvel quote, except the part about the carbonic acid, about which I have no special knowledge. The matter of enzyme versus yeast performance comes up from time to time on the forum. One of the earliest posts on this subject came from member pizzanapoletana (Marco), a Neapolitan dough expert and student of that style, at Reply 125 at
http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,1298.msg13410/topicseen.html#msg13410.
Professor Calvel, at page 56 of his book, also talks about how to remedy a problem with low residual sugar, which is something that Ryan might find of interest:
"Whether doughs are leavened with a
poolish, by
levain-levure (sponge and dough), or with
pate fermentee, whenever they undergo an excess of maturation or fermentation it is a good practice to remedy in advance the resulting lack of residual sugars. To do this, add from 0.1% to 0.2% malt extract during mixing--or on very rare occasions from 0.3% to 0.5% sucrose--to reestablish the proper sugar balance."
The malt extract to which Professor Calvel refers in the above quote is diastatic malt, not non-diastatic malt. A similar recommendation on the use of diastatic malt is also made by Didier Rosada toward the end of his article at
http://web.archive.org/web/20050829015510/www.cafemeetingplace.com/archives/food4_dec2004.htm, but his recommended usage is 0.5-1%. I once had an interesting discussion with a technical person at the largest U.S. producer of malt products and my recollection is that he recommended around 2-3% (I neglected to ask him, however, whether he was referring to the dry or liquid form of the diastatic malt.) According to the article on malt at
http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,8308.msg71658.html#msg71658, one should be able to replace one half of the formula sugar with diastatic malt. In my experiments with diastatic malt, I used it on the low side and found that the results were not much improved. I perhaps should have used more but I was concerned that the dough would become excessively slack from overuse of the diastatic malt. Ryan (Gags) might want to keep these considerations in mind if he decides to continue to use his cold fermentation version of JerryMac's recipe.
There have been experiments, including one by me, to try to increase the residual levels of sugars in a water-flour mixture by giving the alpha/beta amylase enzymes more time to work on sugar conversion. See, for example, Reply 69 at
http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,7740.msg66521.html#msg66521 and also the thread at
http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,7770.msg66722.html#msg66722.
I'm sure that JerryMac will confirm all of the above when he reads this post and the few that preceded it. He will perhaps ask us to never darken the door of this thread again
.
Peter
