A Tale of Two Sicilians

[jeff v]

If Josh has already made a preferment with 1000 grams of flour and 750 grams of water

Josh is going to be eatling lots of pizza, hopefully you have a big family! 




Peter,

You are correct, and thanks for taking the time to scale the formula. It's getting to be that time of year for me to do more work on these...

Josh,

When you get used to working with the dough calculator it becomes really easy to scale recipes for all sorts of different situations. In my case for two 9x9 pans I just had to cut the single dough ball in half to get the "right" thickness and amount of dough in the pan, because that's the thickness I plugged in the calculator. Make sense? They are a great tool.

Jeff

[torontonian]

Don't worry - no shortage of pizza lovers around here!

I took this dough out of the fridge this morning to weight it to compare against Peter's calculations, and Jeff you're right this is a very wet dough. Difficult trying to weigh such an unyielding blob.

In any case, did you par-bake the crust at all? I know for some other thick crust pizzas I've made, especially those in a pan, I've found that I've needed to.

Thx,
Josh

[Pete-zza]

Josh,

In your case for your two pans, I think your best bet is to measure out about 763 grams of your preferment and combine that with about 2 more grams of IDY (about 2/3 teaspoon), and

Morton's Kosher Salt (2.5%): 10.87 g | 0.38 oz | 0.02 lbs | 2.26 tsp | 0.75 tbsp
Olive Oil (5%): 21.73 g | 0.77 oz | 0.05 lbs | 4.83 tsp | 1.61 tbsp

Then divide the final dough into the two dough batch sizes for your two pans. For the remaining (unused) part of your preferment, you will have to use the expanded dough calculating tool to figure out how to adapt it to the sizes of your pans. As noted previously, you will need 326.31 grams of dough for your 9" x 9" pan, and 471.34 grams of dough for your 9" x 13" pan. The math should keep you busy for a while .

Peter

[torontonian]

Peter,

Actually, I used equal amounts of flour and water (in case that wasn't clear) 750g of each, plus about 1 tsp of IDY. I chilled this for about 12 hours (per Jeff's instruction), and then added 250g flour, 1.74T kosher salt, and 3.7T EVOO, and 2.2t IDY. This has been sitting in my fridge overnight.

I weighed it this morning and it was 1650g. Less than the 1835g you calculated, but I had quite a bit of bowl and hook residue, due to the wetness.

By my math, I can split the dough in two, and fill the 9x9 and 9x13 today, and do it all over again tomorrow 

Josh

[Pete-zza]

Josh,

I misread what Jeff did in his original post. What he did and what you did was to create a poolish. I revised my last post so as not to mislead anyone.

What you did was correct and I think you should be able to make a total of four pizzas with a little bit of dough left over.

FYI for future purposes, when I make doughs that will have very high hydrations I use a bowl residue compensation of around 3%. But, even then, I try to salvage as much of the dough as possible.

Peter

[jeff v]

In any case, did you par-bake the crust at all? I know for some other thick crust pizzas I've made, especially those in a pan, I've found that I've needed to.

Josh,

No par bakes here.

[torontonian]

I baked the pizzas for dinner. They turned out great. I've never had a Sicilian before, but I liked the look of it so I tried it. I couldn't find my camera to take pictures, but it turned out very similar in look to a number of Sicilians on the site. The crust was very similar to focaccia bread, and was nice and crispy around the edges with baked cheese. My only knock was the rather strong olive oil taste. Not sure if this was from the 5% dough content, or the 1.5T in the pan (which seemed to want to collect around the edges when I went to lay it into the pan).

I was a little concerned when laying these out in the pans, since the dough was so wet. I did leave them in the fridge for an hour before topping as Jeff suggested, by which point the dough became much easier to stretch to the corners.

All in all a great experience. Thanks all for the help and advice!

-- Josh