giotto,
Like you, I often make cold fermented doughs that use cold water and small amounts of yeast and, to be honest, I often can't tell whether the dough has grown, or by how much, while in the refrigerator. In my case, the inability to detect the growth may be due to the containers I typically use to store my dough balls. I use fairly oversized metal or plastic lidded containers. When the dough balls go into the containers, they are round and elastic and hard to flatten but over time they spread and slump to fill the spaces in the container around the dough, making it problematic to detect the extent of dough growth. This has never been a problem from a performance standpoint so I haven't concerned myself that I couldn't always detect or accurately measure growth of the dough. I suppose I would have to use a tall straight-sided container with a much smaller diameter than I now use to accentuate the growth dimension of the dough to confirm that there is actual growth. I suspect that there is growth in my case but it isn't easily visually discernible in many, if not most, cases where I am using cold water and small amounts of yeast.
I would estimate that over ninety percent of what I have read on the subject of bubbling in pizza crusts has centered on cold dough or underfermentation or too much yeast or excessive oven heat as the most frequent causes of most bubbling. You might recall that in an earlier post I noted that you do not let your dough balls warm up all that much (about one-half hour) before shaping. Also, you frequently (almost always?) use a pre-bake. In your recent post in which you presented the Harvest King dough formulation, at Reply 16 at
http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,4284.msg36146.html#msg36146, you indicated a pre-bake temperature of 530 degrees F. I wondered whether the combination of the cold dough and the high-temperature "naked" pre-bake were the cause of the blistering or major contributors thereto. This begs the question of whether you have ever used the Harvest King (or other) dough formulation to make a fully dressed pizza before baking and, if so, whether you got the blistering.
I might add that one of our members, in a PM to me a few months ago, indicated that he had tried well over 100 pizzas in an effort to intentionally provoke bubbling in his finished crusts. He was more interested in the big bubbles rather than small blisters. He varied just about everything that could be varied but was unsuccessful. I believe he was using the Lehmann dough formulation, which led me to wonder whether some dough formulations are more, or less, prone to bubbling and blistering than others. I had read something somewhere to that effect so I was prepared to accept the possibility until I could find the answer on my own. As noted previously, my efforts to intentionally provoke bubbling and blistering by doing all of the things that are said to contribute to bubbling and blistering did not succeed. Like November, I have tended to get the blistering from doughs at the tail end of fermentation, just as I did recently with a 12+-day old dough.
Peter
