Do you over ferment?

[Swinger-mike]

How to know when the dough has fermented "on point" / to the "sweet spot"?

Its on point when you like the taste, handling of the dough and baked endproduct best.

[Jersey Pie Boy]

So Mike, you feel the point is very subjective. By that definition, tonight's bake was not on point. It was like fairly dense and ate heavy. Flavor was good but not in love. Opened and handled very nicely. But photos quite misleading; looks airy and open. The ferment and proof went pretty far..too far? Craig, what would your call be? Blend of 47% PPower Flour, 43 Graincraft NP 00, 10 Bob's Red Mill Ww. 5% moby,, 3 oil, 2.7 salt 70 HR. 3 and 3:30 bakes.
Can't be sure if it's a flour blend issue or being over..or also the SD ?

[Loarina Vega]

I Feel Like My Sweet Spot is 44-53 hrs.  CF at 40 °   24 hrs After that it seems to collapse to the point of no return .....i often wonder if that Flatbread kind of bake That ChicagoPizza n Grinder Co.... is made from their Overproofed Blown out dough ...I toss it.... but thinking to try it  🤔

[Yael]

Any idea how much the ball has expanded at that point? And how long time in balls vs total time?
[...]

During this pizza class I mentioned in your old thread, there was my Italian friend and pizza instructor Ermanno Furlanis who was saying "the pizzaiolo needs to take some risks" while talking about when using the dough. "Most of them don't want to take risks", he said.

I very seldom use individual container, I use plastic dough tray/box, so I don't how's the dough under, but it somewhere between 2 and 3 times the original size.

Thing is, in order to know when to ball, there are many factors to take into consideration:
- hydration
- flour strength
- room temperature
- mixing technique

And from my experience:
- higher hydration = later balling;
- higher flour strength = sooner balling;
- higher RT = sooner balling;
- longer mixing (what we call in French "intensive" mixing, I'm not sure about the equivalent in English, it basically means a long high-speed kneading) = sooner balling.

Then you have to juggle between all these factors in order to reach the best result.

On the face of it, a later balling seems safer than a sooner one because the dough kind of get a second life, but, in addition to the low level of sugar remaining in the dough that a late balling can lead to, once the dough already fermented for a while the gluten network starts to be very obvious, very present, and this kind of late balling may yield an uneven dough ball, with a lot of "nerves", that can be problematic for the dough opening.

Hope you guys get my meaning 

[Jersey Pie Boy]

I used to late ball, but just as you noted, the dough suffered..many thin areas. An issue resolved by balling sooner
.

[Swinger-mike]

So Mike, you feel the point is very subjective. By that definition, tonight's bake was not on point. It was like fairly dense and ate heavy. Flavor was good but not in love. Opened and handled very nicely. But photos quite misleading; looks airy and open. The ferment and proof went pretty far..too far? Craig, what would your call be? Blend of 47% PPower Flour, 43 Graincraft NP 00, 10 Bob's Red Mill Ww. 5% moby,, 3 oil, 2.7 salt 70 HR. 3 and 3:30 bakes.
Can't be sure if it's a flour blend issue or being over..or also the SD ?

To me judging by the looks of this dougball its overfermented, but it is indeed subjective.

pizza looks good though.

[Jersey Pie Boy]

Definitely seems over to me...so much so that I decided not to preheat oven until beginning to open the dough in case it was unusable. And yes Opened great, handled well, but still very dense. And heavy...
I should try a different flour mix and intentionally taking it to this point and see the results.

[Heikjo]

Here’s one from today. Caputo Pizzeria, 62%, 0.22% IDY. I made three balls. The one in the plastic container was balled after 6/24 hours since I wanted an accurate reading of the volume. The other two were balled after 16/24 hours, both placed on wood. Don’t quite remember how far the first ball were gone at that time, but certainly past 1.2x. One of the two was left there until bake, one was moved to a plastic surface 3 hour before bake. All were left in the cooler (16-18C) until opened.

I put some tape to indicate the point where the ball had doubled, at the top of the piece of tape. It went a little past this, maybe around 2.3x when I took the photo and used it.

They all became good pizza, the crust noticeably better than previous balls that fermented less. The two on wood opened quite easy, but the one in the container had more elastic properties and needed more effort to open. I’ve always liked how balls that are allowed to ferment somewhat freely open, compared to ones lept in a restrictive container of some sort. I still didn’t expect the plastic container one to have more elasticity, especially considering it had more time in ball than the other two. The container ball was also more misshapen since I had to peel it out of there. I believe I used the top of the ball as bottom of the skin. Normally I let the bottom be bottom.

The skins were becoming somewhat fragile at this point, mostly due to the larger bubbles that can create very thin spots. Had they gone much further, I’d be quite worried about snagging and crashing inside the oven.

As Yael and others have discussed, there are a lot more to the total equation than fermentation time and volumetric increase.

[Jersey Pie Boy]

So as noted above, different dough to see if the denseness and disappointing chew of my hybrid above was an issue of overfermentation or flour choice.
This time 90% Red Rose, 10% BRM WW, 5 SD, 2.7 salt, 3 oil, 72HR. RT ferment beyond the right point, brief fridge hold for timing.
In spite of the dough bubbling and looking very blown, it baked up very nicely, though had to be careful handling. Texture and flavor a lot better than expected and actually quite good.And  this dough was quite a bit more over than previous one.
So my conclusion is either A) it was flour choice  or B)  What're you gonna do?