Flour question and an apology

[roevey]

This website frustrated me to no end up until about three months ago. That was when I moved out of chicago and champaign to seattle. Any (and every) time i needed the number for papa del's, this website was the first hit. And pretty much every time I opened the link, only to find the recipe section for papa del's. Those five seconds of wasted time frustrated me to no end when I was in search of delicious pizza. Anyway, thank goodness for that because the pizza in seattle is awful, and I now have somewhere to try and figure out how to make my own pizza.

So thank you, and I'm sorry for hating you pizzamaking.com.

I tried the papa del's recipe last weekend; I was pretty disappointed. I found the recipe overly dry and the crust especially seemed lacking. I must admit that it looked beautiful, however. Can anyone suggest why my crust tasted slightly like a biscuit? Could I have had too much salt, or something of the like? (I'm pretty ignorant to cooking, so any and all help is appreciated. I just spent six years at U of Illinois, and most of those were spent with old style and papa del's and not in the kitchen)

Anyway, this weekend is for experimentation. I've pretty much stolen other people's suggestions and melded them into my own. I found red november's suggestion for nuking the herbs prior to mixing in the sauce as well as a link posted to an external site that broke down the effects of each ingredient in the crust quite interesting.


Now for my other question. My sister has a gluten allergy, and eventually I'd like to be able to make something that doesn't taste like cardboard when using gluten free flour. Has anyone experimented with this? Does it have a drastic effect upon the quality of the dough?

Anyway, this site is great. Hopefully I'll be able to tackle thin crust sometime soon as well. Nick and vito's and rosangela's are my favorite. I need to get out of seattle...

[Pete-zza]

roevey,

Your enmity for our forum reminds me of the old 1980’s Kelly LeBrock “Don’t hate me because I am beautiful” commercial (

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hz8ul-gmLyA" target="_blank" class="aeva_link bbc_link new_win">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hz8ul-gmLyA</a>

). In time, you will discover that pizzamaking.com is beautiful and should not be hated but respected and admired

As for the Papa Del’s recipe, I assume that you are referring to the Papa Del’s recipe at http://www.pizzamaking.com/papadels.php. I have not tried that recipe but if I had to guess I would say that the biscuit-like flavor perhaps comes from the milk, yeast and butter, which are common components of some biscuit recipes, although many such recipes also call for a chemical leavening system (e.g. baking powder). The levels of the salt and the rest of the ingredients appear to be quite normal. The dough is a fairly dry dough. With four cups flour (either all-purpose flour or bread flour) measured out textbook style and with one cup of milk, I estimate the hydration of the dough to be around 47-48%. If you used a heavy hand in measuring out the flour, your dough could have been even drier. To get a more tender crust, you could increase the hydration or use the same hydration but use more fat, either butter or oil. You might try doing both. And you can replace part of the milk with water.

As for your question on gluten-free recipes, there is not much on that subject on the forum although the subject has come up before on these threads:
http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,1815.msg16050.html#msg16050
http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,2084.msg18346.html#msg18346.

Good luck.

Peter

[roevey]

I tried fooling around with a couple things (adding egg, changing flour, adding slightly more oil) and I'm still not getting quite what I would like.

I still have a couple questions.

-I've been putting the dough in the fridge for 24 hours. How critical is the liquid temperature that I'm adding the ADY to? (ie should it be room temp, warm, hot and how big of an effect does it have) Also, should I let the yeast sit before adding things like salt?

-If I keep adding oil or increasing the hydration, will this give me a fluffier crust? My crust is overly stiff and rather too dense whereas I would like it to be more soft and fluffy in the upper portion of the deep dish crust.


I found some tips about using parimgiano-reggiano. That was what I was missing from my cheese. It's good stuff used in my favorite places. And thanks for the heads up on the gluten free flour.

[Pete-zza]

-I've been putting the dough in the fridge for 24 hours. How critical is the liquid temperature that I'm adding the ADY to? (ie should it be room temp, warm, hot and how big of an effect does it have) Also, should I let the yeast sit before adding things like salt?

-If I keep adding oil or increasing the hydration, will this give me a fluffier crust? My crust is overly stiff and rather too dense whereas I would like it to be more soft and fluffy in the upper portion of the deep dish crust.

roevey,

The recommended temperature for rehydrating ADY is around 105 degrees F. Often the range used on packets of ADY is stated as 100-110 degrees F. It is important not to deviate too far outside of that range since that may affect the yeast's performance. In fact, the most common problem when using ADY is using water that is too cold or too hot. Most people just guess at the water temperature and do not use a thermometer to be on the safe side. The recommended amount of water to use to rehydrate the ADY is about four to five times the weight of the ADY. My practice in a typical home setting is to just use about a quarter cup of water (at the proper temperature) to rehydrate the ADY. You can add a bit of sugar to the rehydration water to get the yeast going but I wouldn't add all of the sugar, just a pinch.  In rehydrating the ADY, it is best not to go beyond about 10-15 minutes. The water outside of the water used to rehydrate the ADY can be cooler than the water used to rehydrate the ADY. The sum of the water used to rehydrate the ADY and the rest of the water should be equal to the formula water.

Once salt is thoroughly dissolved in the formula water used to make the dough, it is usually safe to add the rehydrated ADY. I usually dissolve the sugar in the same water as the salt.

If you increase the hydration of the dough and also use more oil, you should get a more open and airy crumb. However, if you add too much oil, that can work against an open and airy crumb although the crumb will be more tender. Adding more sugar will also increase the tenderness of the finished crust. I can't tell from the Papa Del's formulation whether the crust is supposed to be a light and fluffy crust or whether it is supposed to be like a deep-dish crust. Deep-dish crusts often use oil in a range of from around 8% on the low end to about 30% on the high end (by weight of flour). You might first try increasing the hydration (the amount of water) to get a more open and airy crumb and then decide whether that does the trick. You can always increase the amount of oil (or other form of fat) later.

Peter

[Randy]

I think we need a Pappa Del's champion to figure this recipe out.  The one on the front page just isn't that good.  Maybe  roevey is the person?

[Jack]

I need to get out of seattle...

Roevey,

YES, the pizza sucks here in Seattle and it is difficult to find good high protein flour, but once you figure out the people here (they are weird to us transplants), it's a great place.  I brought my family out in the Fall of 2001. 

Hey, I'm going to PM you with my contact info.  Let's talk. It took us 3 years to figure this place out, but now it's great.

Jack

[roevey]

-I'm beginning to think part of my problem lies in letting the dough over-rise. I won't attempt to use proofing terminology as other posts just confused me. Is there a trick to knowing when your dough is fully risen/any tricks to prevent it from rising too much? I was thinking of storing the dough in my fridge in a pyrex so I could measure the expansion and then make sure it gets cooked when it reaches some percent increase, but I really don't know.

-Also, can someone take a look at my latest try and comment on whether any of my percentages seem way off (flour and corn meal add up to 100%):
KA AP flour: 84%
corn meal: 16%
water: 40%
ADY: 1%
salt: 1%
oil: 20%
sugar: 2%

Add ADY to 105F water, then everything is mixed in kitchenaid with knead hook for less than 2 minutes. Throw in plastic bowl, thinly coat with oil, cover with lid and fridge for at least 24 hours. When ready to cook, take out dough 1 hour before preparation.

My flour and corn meal weight is 19.9 oz, and I'm using a 12" pan with a 2" lip with PSTK.

-Basically, my dough seems overly dense and tastes not good. I don't have the verbal repertoire to describe what I'm getting, I guess. It just doesn't seem like I'm getting enough rise in the final product. I've read other posts about adding steam during the early bake segments or prebaking the crust a little. Anyone have a comment on this?

Thanks for the help you've given me already. I've made more progress in a few short weeks with your help than I could have done alone. Cheers.

[Pete-zza]

roevey,

As a point of clarification, can you tell me whether the percents given for water, ADY, etc., are with respect to the combined weight of the flour and cornmeal or just the flour alone? Also, are the sides of your PSTK pan straight or sloping and, if sloping, what are the top and bottom diameters of the pan? And how far up the sides of the pan do you want the dough to go? With the answers to these questions, I think I should be able to get a better feel for what you have been doing.

Peter

[roevey]

The percentages are of the combined flour and corn meal. I took that as 100% and worked it from there. However, I have also done recipes with simply 100% flour and no corn meal with similar results.

My pan is from lloyd industries and it is stacking, so I'm assuming it is straight sided, and I think the actual depth is 2.25", however I probably bring the dough up about 1 3/4".

[Pete-zza]

roevey,

I took the liberty of converting your dough formulation to a format that would permit me to use the deep-dish dough calculating tool at http://www.pizzamaking.com/dd_calculator.html. To use that tool, I treated the cornmeal separately from the flour, and I converted the baker’s percents of the remaining ingredients so that they would be stated with respect to the flour alone. After checking the pizzatools.com website, I treated your 12” PSTK as being sloping sided only because the upper dimension was given as 12” and the bottom dimension was given as 11.875”.  However, even if I used 12” for both the top and bottom dimensions, the results would not have materially changed. I forgot to ask you what kind of oil you were using, so I assumed corn oil for my purposes. However, most oils used to make deep-dish doughs weigh pretty much the same on a unit basis, so the results shouldn’t be much different, if at all, if you used another oil.

Based on the above, I came up with the following dough formulation:

Flour (100%): Water (47.6190%): ADY (1.19047%): Salt (1.19047%): Corn Oil (23.8095%): Sugar (2.38095%): Cornmeal (19.0476%): Total (195.23799%):

473.9 g  |  16.72 oz | 1.04 lbs 225.67 g  |  7.96 oz | 0.5 lbs 5.64 g | 0.2 oz | 0.01 lbs | 1.49 tsp | 0.5 tbsp 5.64 g | 0.2 oz | 0.01 lbs | 1.01 tsp | 0.34 tbsp 112.83 g | 3.98 oz | 0.25 lbs | 8.36 tbsp | 0.52 cups 11.28 g | 0.4 oz | 0.02 lbs | 2.83 tsp | 0.94 tbsp 90.27 g | 3.18 oz | 0.2 lbs | 9.08 tbsp | 0.57 cups 925.24 g | 32.64 oz | 2.04 lbs | TF = 0.19562

The most important number in the above formulation for our discussion purposes is the thickness factor (TF). At 0.19562, that is much higher than thickness factor values typically used for deep-dish doughs. More typical thickness factor values are around 0.11-0.135.  So, if I had to guess, I would say that a good part of the problem you experienced with your dough formulation was because you used far too much dough for the size of your pan. Using all flour and no cornmeal would not have corrected that. It’s also possible that your hydration was too low. For example, if you look at DKM’s cornmeal-based dough formulation at http://www.pizzamaking.com/dkm_chicago.php, you will see a hydration value of 61.1%, versus the 47.619% of your dough formulation. All things considered, I can see how your dough would have been stiff and dense and not likely to rise that much. I suspect that you would have needed much more yeast to get a particularly noticeable rise in the dough.

I noted that you used only 2 minutes of kneading. If you look at DKM’s dough formulation, you will see that the instructions call for a total mix/knead time that is somewhere around 10 minutes. I suspect that the 2 minutes you used for a bit over two pounds of dough was just not long enough, and that you ended up with an underkneaded dough with a poor structure.

As I see it, you have a few choices at this point. You can use your dough formulation but using something around 0.13 as a thickness factor in the deep-dish dough calculating tool (along with all of the other inputs required by the tool), or you can simply try DKM’s dough formulation or some other. If you decide to proceed with a modified version of your dough formulation, I would use the DKM instructions. I have no idea as to how the modified version will turn out even if you use a smaller value of thickness factor. However, the dough will fit your pan better.

Peter

[pnj]

You can always leave Seattle......

I'm curious what type of pie you like and what resturants in Seattle you have tried?

What part of Seattle do you reside? (N, S, W, E , etc)

[roevey]

Hm. I believe my problems stem from the fact that I started with the papa del's recipe, then. That calls for a 10" pan and 4 cups of flour, from which point I based things off of the weight of the 4 cups. I will reduce the recipe to fit my 12" pan.

Also, the short knead time is something I picked up on in previous posts that talked about short kneading times. I had previously used longer knead times and was experimenting with the shorter ones. Am I wrong in attempting to do this?

[roevey]

You can always leave Seattle......

I'm curious what type of pie you like and what resturants in Seattle you have tried?

What part of Seattle do you reside? (N, S, W, E , etc)

I'm obligated for a year for work reasons, and this was the best option in terms of cities to live in (as opposed to waco and wichita and worse). I live in north seattle in greenwood area. I'm partial to chicago thin as well as deep dish, but pretty much anything tasty I'll settle for. Most people here are partial to pagliacci's, which i'm not fond of. I've tried mama's, talarico's, piecora's, wallingford pizza house, romio's, a new york pizza place, northlake tavern, belltown pizza, stacia's, zeeks, and probably others.

Some were better than others.

[Rein Ciarfella]

roevey

My several thoughts...

Your 2-minute kneading time was the first I spotted.  Not nearly enough time for gluten to develop.  I knead for 15 minutes (see below) by hand.

Testing manually for amount of rise - poke gently with a digit.  Springback - not risen enough.  A slight dent which stays dented - good amount of rise.  Deflation - risen more than enough (although all is not necessarily lost).  Actually, I don't use the poke method anymore.  For quite a while I proofed in a clear or translucent container of either glass or plastic and judged rise by appearance of gas pockets all the way down to near the bottom of the container.  I found as long as approximately two-thirds of the dough or more developed gas pockets I was good to go.  After a while I got to where I could judge pretty well by volume, without measuring.

If I want to slow my dough way down I stick it in the freezer right after kneading and then get it up to the fridge once it's cooled down.  If I want a fast rise I put it in my homemade proofing box.  If I want it to rise in several hours I stick it in the fridge.

My initial experimentation with amount of salt indicated that too much salt killed any rise and gave the same, dead, tough results you've described.  It wasn't until I'd discovered this forum and did the research that I confirmed my results.

After using an instant read thermometer for months to make sure all my temps were right I'm finally at that point were I can run the tap water (I have a well) to where it feels right for the yeast and I don't have to constantly check my proofing box to know that the dough is happily rising inside.

Something else, since I'm on the subject of yeast water - I discovered something by accident in a cook book about how to get yeast started in warm water.  I used to think that mixing the ADY in well and then covering the container with a saucer and wrapping with a towel (and even putting it in my proofing box!) would help speed up the process.  The book called for sprinkling the yeast and then the sugar on the water and covering.  It didn't dawn on me until a couple weeks later that the auther did *not* call for stirring the yeast and sugar into the water.  I tried it (just letting the yeast and sugar sit or sink on their own) and I got heavy-duty activity very quickly - much quicker than before - even just on the countertop with a saucer over it and nothing else.  My deduction from this is purely empirical - yeast likes a combination of air and water (aerobic, as opposed to anerobic) at the same time and drowning it in water isn't its most happy environment - and if it has sugar in the solution it's even happier.

I'd recommend foregoing use of your mixer for the time being and get into the Zen of hand kneading. Until you really get a feel for the dough you'll never really be able to tell when it's too wet, too dry, not kneaded long enough, too cool, too warm, etc..  I still knead by hand for15 minutes and the only reason I'm considering a machine now is because I eventually want to be able to make larger batches.  It's a time my wife knows to leave me alone with My Dough - the two of us just want to be by ourselves to enjoy the moment.  

RC

[sourdough girl]

roevey,
I'm really curious about Tutta Bella in Seattle... don't get down to the city often (HATE the traffic!) but they are apparently opening one in Woodinville this summer, which is a much nicer, and a litle shorter, drive. 

Sure would love to know your opinion, if you've been there... might be an excuse for you to have pizza, if you haven't been there!

Sorry you hate Seattle    ... I've lived in Vallejo CA, Idaho Falls ID, Newport News VA,  Richland WA (desert!) and all over Oregon, from Portland down to Grants Pass, also spent much time in the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre area of PA.  My husband is from SD... and neither of us would ever dream of leaving the Seattle area!  That's why I'm making my own pizza!!   

~sd

[Pete-zza]

Also, the short knead time is something I picked up on in previous posts that talked about short kneading times. I had previously used longer knead times and was experimenting with the shorter ones. Am I wrong in attempting to do this?

roevey,

There is nothing wrong with a brief knead. That is a method that has been advocated and popularized on the forum by member buzz. However, the dough formulation has to be conducive to that method. I don’t think that a dough batch that weighs around two pounds and contains a fair amount of cornmeal is the best candidate for brief kneading. It takes time to hydrate all of the flour and cornmeal and to incorporate all of the oil.

I took the Papa Del’s recipe you started with and, assuming that the four cups of flour weigh around 18 ounces, I ran the numbers through the expanded dough calculating tool at http://www.pizzamaking.com/expanded_calculator.html, which allows entering the quantities for butter and milk. As you will see from the following, the formulation is a lot different from the one you posted earlier.

Flour (100%): Water (0%): IDY (1.38888%): Salt (1.09375%): Sugar (2.34375%): Milk (fresh) (47.0311%): Butter (2.78022%): Total (154.6377%):

510.3 g  |  18 oz | 1.13 lbs 0 g  |  0 oz | 0 lbs 7.09 g | 0.25 oz | 0.02 lbs | 2.35 tsp | 0.78 tbsp 5.58 g | 0.2 oz | 0.01 lbs | 1 tsp | 0.33 tbsp 11.96 g | 0.42 oz | 0.03 lbs | 3 tsp | 1 tbsp 240 g | 8.47 oz | 0.53 lbs | 16 tbsp | 1 cups 14.19 g | 0.5 oz | 0.03 lbs | 3 tsp | 1 tbsp 789.12 g | 27.83 oz | 1.74 lbs | TF = N/A

Once you get the proper dough weight for your pan, I think you will see improvement. You didn’t indicate what kind of oil you used but you might not want to use all olive oil. A blend of olive oil and another oil, such as corn oil, may be a better choice from a flavor standpoint. Canola oil is also a good choice, either alone of as part of a blend.

Peter

[roevey]

I took the Papa Del’s recipe you started with and, assuming that the four cups of flour weigh around 18 ounces, I ran the numbers through the expanded dough calculating tool at http://www.pizzamaking.com/expanded_calculator.html, which allows entering the quantities for butter and milk. As you will see from the following, the formulation is a lot different from the one you posted earlier.

Agreed. The only way I could calculate the TF was by back calculating it using your spread sheet. Using that formulation (del's) and my pan, I ballpark a TF of almost .25 using that recipe. Much too thick based on your suggestions. Hopefully this has been a major source of my poor results.

roevey,
I'm really curious about Tutta Bella in Seattle... don't get down to the city often (HATE the traffic!) but they are apparently opening one in Woodinville this summer, which is a much nicer, and a litle shorter, drive

I'll try to scope it out this weekend. It's not too far from where I live. To be honest, marysville isnt that far from where I work...the drive isn't THAT bad. Though the drivers are...

roevey

My several thoughts...

Your 2-minute kneading time was the first I spotted.  Not nearly enough time for gluten to develop.  I knead for 15 minutes (see below) by hand.

Testing manually for amount of rise - poke gently with a digit.  Springback - not risen enough.  A slight dent which stays dented - good amount of rise.  Deflation - risen more than enough (although all is not necessarily lost).  Actually, I don't use the poke method anymore.  For quite a while I proofed in a clear or translucent container of either glass or plastic and judged rise by appearance of gas pockets all the way down to near the bottom of the container.  I found as long as approximately two-thirds of the dough or more developed gas pockets I was good to go.  After a while I got to where I could judge pretty well by volume, without measuring.

Thank you for talking about this. I'm pretty ignorant to cooking; everything helps.