itnenaer,
As reported at Reply 19 at
http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,203.msg54497/topicseen.html#msg54497, I attempted the Reinhart dough recipe you mentioned, so I am generally familiar with it. To be honest, I have no idea as to the origins of the Reinhart recipe. If I had to guess, I would say that it was perhaps an extension or adaptation of his work with breads. If, for example, you look at the pizza dough recipes that Reinhart included in his pizza cookbook,
American Pie, which he wrote after the
Bread Baker's Apprentice, after traveling and extensively researching the subject of pizza both in the U.S. and Italy, you will not find a dough recipe such as the one he included in the
Bread Baker's Apprentice book. What makes that recipe unusual and not easy to fit into any one of the traditional pizza styles is not the high hydration but rather the very high amount of oil. That aspect is not part of the Neapolitan pizza tradition, as I so noted at Reply 11 at
http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,6327.msg54341.html#msg54341. I personally view the Reinhart dough recipe as somewhat an anomaly that doesn't conveniently fit one of the traditional pizza style classifications, including those that were covered in Reinhart's later book
American Pie.
In your case, by lowering the hydration and the amount of oil, you basically converted Reinhart's recipe to a NY style dough recipe, with a thin crust. If you plan to use the Reinhart recipe as you modified it to make a 16"-18" pizza, rather than using the Reinhart recipe as it now stands, that is perhaps a good thing because if you try to use the Reinhart dough recipe as it now stands to make pizzas that size you would no doubt have a lot of problems handling and shaping and stretching the dough out to that size because of the extreme wetness of the dough. If you used 9 ounces of dough to make a 12"-14" inch pizza, that translates into a thickness factor of 0.0585-0.0796. In experimenting with your 16"-18" pizzas, you will want to select both a hydration value and a thickness factor that will produce the results you are looking for but keep in mind that working with doughs for pizzas that size, especially at high hydration values, is more challenging than working with much smaller pizzas such as those contemplated by the Reinhart recipe. If you'd like, I can help you come up with a formulation that you might try based on whatever set of baker's percents, pizza size, and thickness factor you would like to use. At your option, it can be a modification of the Reinhart recipe or a completely new one.
Peter
