Dennis,
Thank you for the additional information. Anets is quite big in the Midwest. Giordano's is or was a user of Anets sheeters although I was told by someone I spoke with on the subject of rollers that Giordano's was switching to Somerset rollers in some locations.
It's been a while since I last looked at the Nutrition Facts given by Monical's at its website, at
http://www.monicalspizza.com/UserFiles/file/Individual%20Pizzas.pdf. But looking at that information last night and again today, that information has not changed since I last looked at it a couple of years or so ago.
The Monical's Nutrition Facts are quite informative. However, they are quite odd in some respects. For example, the entries in the Nutrition Facts appear to be exact, without the kind of rounding that the FDA permits. From a reverse engineering standpoint, that is good because rounding can change values quite dramatically, and especially where the rounding values become cumulative. Monical's also does not give a serving size, serving size weight, and the number of servings (e.g., a serving size for a pizza is usually a slice). That kind of information makes it easier to reverse engineer products such as pizzas since most of the other numbers in Nutrition Facts (other than calories) are also given by weight. Also, the Monical's Nutrition Facts are for only an individual size pizza, which is 8". Most pizza operators, and especially chains, give the data for all sizes. In Monical's case, however, there used to be a second part of the Monical's Nutrition Facts that said (and later confirmed by an exchange I had with Monical's) that the data for the 8" size (thin crust) was a third of that for the 14" size and a quarter of that for the 16" size. Presumably, that meant that for a 14" pizza, one would use a dough ball three times the weight of that for an 8" pizza and, similarly, for a 16" pizza, one would use a dough ball four times the weight of of that for an 8" pizza. There is nothing in the Monical's Nutrition Facts that explicitly gives the weights of the dough balls. This might be because some of the dough ends up on the cutting room floor after trimming from the cardboard rounds.
Finally, there are empty spots (not even zeros) in the Monical's Nutrition Facts. An example is the column for Sugar. Usually, the entry in Nutrition Facts is for "Sugars" (in the plural), since there are simple and complex sugars that can exist in a dough even if not added to the dough externally, as by adding sucrose (table sugar) or some other sweetener. All flours have small amounts of natural "sugars". The blank space for Sugar may simply mean that Monical's does not add sugar to their thin crust dough. The numbers convince me that there is no sugar added to the thin crust dough.
Monical's also does not add salt to its dough. There is an entry for sodium but, at 3.9mg, it its trivially small. That amount of sodium is equivalent to 0.00168th of a teaspoon of salt. Under current FDA regulations, Monical's could have entered 0 into the Sodium column because it is less than 5mg. So, where does the sodium come from? There is natural sodium in just about all flours. It is about 1mg for a 100mg sample. There is also natural sodium in water and in yeast. But, they are trivial amounts. I do not even bother to account for them in the work that I do with Nutrition Facts. It is clear that Monical's does not add salt to their dough.
From the data for Carbohydrates, Fiber and Protein, I am fairly confident that Monical's is using a low-protein flour, quite possibly an H&R flour or its equivalent. In fact, the numbers seem to mirror the values of the above components in a 100g serving of all-purpose flour. The Total Fat and Sat Fat entries in the Monical's Nutrition Facts are consistent with the generic numbers for many oils, including corn oil. The values given in the Monical's Nutrition Facts is equivalent to about 1/5th of a teaspoon of corn oil.
So, to sum up, the Monical's Nutrition Facts tell us that the Monical's thin crust dough is made up only of flour (most likely all-purpose flour), water, and yeast, with a small amount of oil. No added salt and no added sugar. We don't know if the yeast is IDY or ADY but if the water used to rehydrate the yeast is warm, that would suggest ADY rather than IDY. Either way, it should not be difficult to come up with an amount of either IDY or ADY for a one-day cold ferment.
With respect to the pizza sauce, when I first looked at the numbers for the sauce (for the 8" pizza size), the numbers were so small that I concluded that either a very small amount of sauce was used for the 8" size (maybe less than a couple of ounces) or the tomatoes were watered down. From what you say, it may be the latter, although the total amount of sauce could still be small.
While I haven't studied the Monical Nutrition Facts in detail on the matter of the amount of mozzarella cheese used, the numbers suggest about 2.5 ounces for the 8" size thin crust pizza. The numbers for mozzarella cheese, both low-fat part-skim and whole milk mozzarella cheese, can vary from one brand to another, so the actual amount may be somewhere between 2-3 ounces for an 8" thin crust pizza.
It is very common for pizza operators to use a given pizza dough to make breadsticks. Last night, when I looked at the Monical's Nutrition Facts for breadsticks, at
http://www.monicalspizza.com/UserFiles/file/Non%20pizza%20items.pdf, I did not see a Sugar entry but the Sodium value is considerably higher than for the dough used to make the thin 8" pizza. That made me think that there was salt that was sprinkled on the breadsticks. When I looked at the photo of the breadsticks, at
http://www.monicalspizza.com/menus/default.aspx?SegmentId=1&pg=1, I could clearly see grains of salt. And those grains were large enough to suggest Kosher salt, much as one would use with pretzels.
Somewhere in the course of this thread, someone said that the crust made using the Monical's clone dough formulation that I set forth was a bit too thick. That is quite possible. And, if so, it is because there is insufficient information in the Monical's Nutrition Facts to determine the actual weight of either dough balls or of the actual skins after they are trimmed. There are perhaps other ways of getting the crust thickness right, or at least closer to the actual value, but we would need weights of baked pizzas (plain cheese pizzas are the easiest to work with) and work with those in concert with the Nutrition Facts.
Out of curiosity, when you worked for Monical's, did they recycle the scrap dough trimmed off from around the cardboard rounds? Also, I read somewhere that Monical's used white cornmeal on the peel. Is that your recollections also?
Peter
