toyman,
Your understanding of the window of use of the dough is essentially correct. However, it is not necessary to get the dough to room temperature before using, since room temperature can be too high at times (e.g., in the middle of summer). You should bring the dough out to room temperature for about 1 1/2 hours to 2 hours. In the winter, the actual time might be longer and in the summer it might be shorter. Once the dough is at the right temperature, it is usable for another few hours. A dough made of high-gluten flour will have a longer usable window than one made with, say, all-purpose flour. Unless you use a lot of yeast, you can perhaps even stretch out the window longer than 4 or 5 hours.
I usually determine how much yeast to use based on when I want to use the dough. If I want to use the dough sooner rather than later, I will often use more yeast than if I want to use the dough later rather than sooner. In your case, since you used the dough after 24 hours, rather than, say, three or four days, there was little harm done. You just wasted some yeast. If you had let the dough go out to several days, it might have overfermented and not performed as well. For a cold fermented dough that is to be used several days after making, you don't really need much yeast. It can be less than 0.25% (for IDY) by weight of flour, depending on the time of year. However, when small amounts of yeast are used, you want to be sure that you get the finished dough temperature to around 80 degrees F. The best way to do this is to adjust the water temperature. When using a food processor to make dough, I usually use cold water to be sure that the dough doesn't overheat and get above 80 degrees F, and I try to use the pulse feature as much as possible.
If too much yeast is used for the given circumstances, the dough can become very gassy and rise too fast and result in a weakened gluten structure. The dough may also collapse if not used in time and yield a crust with poor structure. I estimate that you used yeast at around 1.3% of the weight of flour. That is an amount that might be used to make a dough that is ready to use within about 2-4 hours (at room temperature). In your case, you bought more time because you put the dough in the refrigerator, which slowed down the activity of the yeast.
The key to success with making pizza dough is to master the relationship between amount of yeast and the finished dough temperature. There are other factors involved, like hydration and salt levels, but yeast quantity and dough temperature are the two biggest factors.
Peter
