5thElement,
I decided to try the dough recipe I revised for you earlier in this thread. However, in my case, I adjusted the ingredient quantities to make a 14" pizza while keeping the crust thickness the same as what you last used. I also used hand kneading, as will be discussed more fully below. To bake the pizza, I decided to use a pizza screen, for two reasons. First, it was around 90 degrees F (about 32 degrees C) yesterday when I decided to bake the pizza and I did not want to heat my pizza stone for an hour and also unnecessarily heat up my kitchen, and, second, I felt that the use of the screen was closer to your use of a perforated pan.
I used the expanded dough calculating tool at
http://www.pizzamaking.com/expanded_calculator.html to come up with the following dough formulation for my purposes:
Bread Flour (100%):
Water (60%):
IDY (0.30121%):
Salt (1.67442%):
Olive Oil-Light (5.39999%):
Sugar (1.19501%):
Total (168.57063%):
| 271.79 g | 9.59 oz | 0.6 lbs
163.07 g | 5.75 oz | 0.36 lbs
0.82 g | 0.03 oz | 0 lbs | 0.27 tsp | 0.09 tbsp
4.55 g | 0.16 oz | 0.01 lbs | 0.82 tsp | 0.27 tbsp
14.68 g | 0.52 oz | 0.03 lbs | 3.26 tsp | 1.09 tbsp
3.25 g | 0.11 oz | 0.01 lbs | 0.81 tsp | 0.27 tbsp
458.15 g | 16.16 oz | 1.01 lbs | TF = 0.1049804
|
Note: Dough for a 14" pizza; nominal thickness factor = 0.102922; bowl residue compensation = 2%
To prepare the dough, I started by combining the IDY and flour. The flour was a very well known U.S. brand of bread flour (King Arthur), with a protein content of 12.7%. I then added the water to a large mixing bowl, along with the salt and sugar, which I stirred to dissolve. The water had been taken directly out of the refrigerator and was at a temperature of around 50.6 degrees F (about 10.3 degrees C). It was actually a bit cooler when I first took it out of the refrigerator but it warmed up quite quickly when brought out to room temperature. I then added the oil to the mixing bowl. Next, I gradually added the flour/IDY mixture to the mixing bowl and used a wire whisk to stir the overall mixture and hydrate the flour. Any hand whisk can be used for this purpose but the one I used is shown at the top of the photo in Reply 65 at
http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,2223.msg63786.html#msg63786.
Once the hand whisk bogged down, I switched to a sturdy wooden spoon as I continued to add and mix in the flour/IDY mixture. When the spoon started to bog down, I emptied the contents of the mixing bowl onto a work surface where I continued to work in the remaining flour/IDY mixture by hand. To facilitate this step, I used a bench knife to work the flour into the dough mass. The bench knife I use is like the one shown at
http://www.kingarthurflour.com/shop/items/bakers-bench-knife but any bench knife can be used, even the plastic ones (as shown, for example, at
http://www.bakedeco.com/dept.asp?id=194). Once all of the dry ingredients were taken up into the dough ball, I hand kneaded the dough for about 5-6 minutes. The finished dough, which I shaped into a round ball, was smooth and silky and slightly tacky. It was almost perfect.
I then oiled the dough ball and placed it into a plastic storage bag. I elected to use a plastic storage bag without a zip-type closure so that it would be a bit easier to remove the dough ball when time came to use the dough. I simply gathered the top of the storage bag and used a metal tie to close the bag. The bag with the dough in it was placed on a flat dish. The first photo below shows this arrangement. The dough went into the refrigerator for 48 hours.
After the 48 hours of cold fermentation, the dough ball was removed from the storage bag and allowed to warm up at room temperature (around 82 degrees F, or about 28 degrees C). The dough ball at this stage is as shown in the second photo below. Because of my warm kitchen, it took only about one hour for the dough ball to warm up sufficiently to use it to make a pizza skin. The dough was quite extensible but I had no difficulty in opening the dough ball out to 14" to fit my 14" pizza screen. The pizza was then dressed and baked. For this pizza, I decided to use chicken livers, caramelized onions, mushrooms and garlic. For the lip-smacking details on this pizza, see the exemplary photo below as well as Replies 3 and 5 starting at
http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,8658.msg75948.html#msg75948.
The pizza was baked in my electric oven that I had preheated for about 15 minutes to about 525 degrees F (around 274 degrees C). The pizza on the screen was initially placed on the lowest oven rack position and baked for about 8 minutes. This was a couple of minutes longer than usual for me but the unbaked pizza had a lot of toppings and weighed about 37 ounces. Once the rim of the crust started to turn light brown, I moved the pizza off of the screen (which I then removed from the oven) to the uppermost oven rack position where the pizza got additional top baking for about a minute or so. This was in line with the instructions I gave to you with respect to baking your pizza on your perforated pan.
The crust of the finished pizza was quite good and flavorful. It was soft and chewy with a tender crumb. I might have preferred a more crispy bottom crust but I would have had to either bake the pizza longer at a somewhat lower temperature, at the risk of overbaking the cheese and toppings (I didn't want the chicken livers to turn into rocks), or I would have had to use a pizza stone that had been preheated for about an hour at around 525 degrees F (around 274 degrees C). Another option--one that I have used many times before--would have been to use a combination of pizza screen and preheated pizza stone (the pizza is baked on the screen at an upper rack position and later transferred to the preheated pizza stone at a lower oven rack position for bottom crust browning). I might have used this option had it not been so hot in my kitchen.
What I did proves out the dough formulation but that must be considered in relation to my particular situation with my particular oven arrangement. Hopefully, what I did will be instructive in allowing you to modify your particular operating environment to improve your results or suggest alternatives to the same end.
Peter
