Tony G Master W/Starter

[Tony Pizzeria]

In Tony "G" Master dough w/poolish recipe, it calls for 20% poolish, I have used the Pizza calc but cant seem to get it right when it comes to entering the water factor. Seems that without the total weight, its confusing to me. However this is the first time I used a starter, so it may just be me. I was trying to change the weight and size different than his recipe in the book
**** All in all I really enjoyed the book and FWIW I would give it a thumbs up.
If anyone can tell me how to convert his recipe to different sizes and weight, It would be appreciated

[mitchjg]

In Tony "G" Master dough w/poolish recipe, it calls for 20% poolish, I have used the Pizza calc but cant seem to get it right when it comes to entering the water factor. Seems that without the total weight, its confusing to me. However this is the first time I used a starter, so it may just be me. I was trying to change the weight and size different than his recipe in the book
**** All in all I really enjoyed the book and FWIW I would give it a thumbs up.
If anyone can tell me how to convert his recipe to different sizes and weight, It would be appreciated

Can you say a bit more about this?  What are you trying to convert "from" and "to"?   Tony's recipe is very specific, in grams, for each line in the recipe.  And, he says to use 370 grams (about 13 ounces) for a 13 inch pie.  Everything to scale up or down seems right there but I am unclear on what you want to do.

[Tony Pizzeria]

Guess I didn't make it clear, my bad. In Tony's master recipe  it is for 39oz dough ball, it doesn't give the size pizza it makes or the total formula weight.
In the preferment calculator it does not allow for the malt%.... so does it makes a difference?
My problem is that in trying to make the poolish for a different size pizza than the one in the book I entered the 20% then it ask for the % of the water, when i enter this it does not come out even. I'm probably not doing it right. Anyway guess i will just follow the recipe in the book.
Thanks

[mitchjg]

Guess I didn't make it clear, my bad. In Tony's master recipe  it is for 39oz dough ball, it doesn't give the size pizza it makes or the total formula weight.
In the preferment calculator it does not allow for the malt%.... so does it makes a difference?
My problem is that in trying to make the poolish for a different size pizza than the one in the book I entered the 20% then it ask for the % of the water, when i enter this it does not come out even. I'm probably not doing it right. Anyway guess i will just follow the recipe in the book.
Thanks

The book does give you the amount of dough you need for a pie.  See, for example, page 52 at the very top left.  It tells you the dough is 13 ounces and the recipe describes a 13 inch pie.

Tell me what size pizza (and type, is it the New Yorker?) and I will try to help with the math.

[Pete-zza]

Tony,

The preferment dough calculating tool was intended to be used mainly for natural preferments, as is discussed at http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,4996.msg42266.html#msg42266. At the time that Mike (Boy Hits Car) and I worked on the preferment dough calculating tool, we considered if it was possible to come up with a tool that was based on using commercially leavened preferments such as poolish, biga, old dough, etc., but concluded that it would have been extremely difficult to come up with such a tool because there were so many variations in the ingredients that people used to make such preferments.

Peter

[Tony Pizzeria]

Thanks all, I think I figured it out (maybe) any way Mitch I want to make 2 16-in pies, yes NY style
Thx Mitch n Peter

[mitchjg]

OK.

Let's start with one 13 inch pie at 370 grams (13.05 ounces). 

a 13 inch pie has a radius of 6.5 inches while a 16 inch pie has a radius of 8.  The area of a circle is "Pi time r squared" or 3.142 X r X r.
So, the area of the 13 inch pie is 3.142 X 6.5 X 6.5 = 132.75 square inches.  The "thickness factor" is 13.05/132.75  = .098.

The 16 inch pie has an area of 3.142 X 8 X 8 = 201.09.  For the same thickness, you need 0.098 X 201.09 = 19.71 ounces.
So, all the ingredients need to be "Scaled up" by 19.71/13.05 = 1.51.  In other words a 16 inch pie needs 51% more dough than a 13 inch pie.
Given that is 2 pies, then you need to have 102% more dough for the two 16 inch pies compared to the one 13 inch pie.

Phew.

Now, let's look at Tony's Master dough with starter, page 44.  The total of the ingredients on the page is 850.2 grams (notice it says 820 at the top of the page.  Maybe that is to allow for some waste while mixing. I don't know).

850.2 grams is the same as 850.2/28.35 = 30.0 ounces. So, the recipe produces 30 ounces (let's say 29, like the top of the page says) and you need 19.71 X 2 pies = 39.4 ounces.

So, then all of the ingredients in the recipe would be scaled by taking 39.4/29 = 1.36.  Take 1.36 X  each ingredient on the page and you have the recipe for 2 - 16 inch pies.

The recipe calls for 90 grams of Tiga.  So, you need 1.36 X 90 =  122.4 grams of Tiga.

I think I got each number right, feel free to shadow the math to check on me, etc.

Please feel free to ask questions if some of this is unclear.

[Tony Pizzeria]

Hey Mitch
              Thanks a lot. I really appreciate the work you have done.

[Pete-zza]

Tony,

Mitch discussed using a tiga whereas you mentioned a poolish. Tony's book allows for using either. So, if you want a poolish, you will want to be sure to use the correct proportions of ingredients.

Peter

[mitchjg]

Tony,

Mitch discussed using a tiga whereas you mentioned a poolish. Tony's book allows for using either. So, if you want a poolish, you will want to be sure to use the correct proportions of ingredients.

Peter

Thank you, Peter.  I rechecked to be sure - the amount of poolish or Tiga was the same (although there is a slight difference in the total hydration because of that).  No change above.

[Essen1]

This is really interesting. I'm currently working on the same dough and also in a 16" size.

I scaled everything up but didn't go by the thickness factor rather than by a fixed total dough weight for one pie, in my case I picked 500 grams. I used the same percentages as shown on Page 302, added them all up and got a total of 189.5%.

Take the total dough weight I chose and divide this by the total amount of Baker's percent...

500 ÷ 189.5 = 2.64 (rounded up from 2.63852243)

You now take the 2.64 and multiply each ingredient percentage individually, i.e...

2.64 x 100 = 264 grams of flour
2.64 x 64   = 168.96 / 169 grams of water
2.64 x 20   = 52.8 / 53 grams of starter

...etc. You get my drift.

My total dough weight, when adding everything up came to 500.52 grams, 0.52 grams over but I can live with that.

Whereas Mitch's approach is probably much more accurate I like the simpler approach, since I'm not a math wizard. You can scale any formula up and down very quickly once you decided which total dough weight you would want. And if you want to make more than one pizza, just multiply every ingredient by the numbers of pizzas you have in mind.

Hope that helps, too.

[mitchjg]

Hi Mike:

Of course that works, too!

A drop of caution - I recall that, when I first got the book, I found several discrepancies between the recipes in the book and the baker's percents in the back.   I do not remember if that was the case for the Master Dough with Starter.  Frankly, after spending too much time trying to make heads and tails from the chart vs. the actual recipes,  I just figured it would be something corrected in a later edition and I moved on. 

It is no big whoop to type in the recipe and come up with the actual baker's percents (which is what I do).  For this explanation, I deliberately stayed away from the baker's percents - only because I did not know what the OP knows or doesn't know about that and I did not want to assume (or try to figure it out).

Best,
Mitch

[Pete-zza]

Mitch and Tony and Mike,

I believe that I have found a way to use the expanded dough calculating tool at http://www.pizzamaking.com/expanded-calculator.html to do most of the calculations.

To begin, I added up all of the numbers (in grams) for all of the ingredients, including the poolish (or tiga, if used), for Tony G's recipe. This gave me the number 850.2 grams for the total dough batch weight. I then calculated the baker's percents for all of the ingredients based on the weight of the formula flour (453 grams). I entered the baker's percents for the water (70g + 210g = 280 grams total, or a ratio of 25/75), ADY, salt, EVOO, and the LDM low-diastatic malt into the expanded dough calculating tool. Since there is no poolish or tiga entry in the tool, I simply used another unused entry as a proxy for the poolish or tiga. In my case, I used the semolina entry. You will note below that I edited the dough formulation to delete the volume measurements for the LDM (since the diastatic malt entry in the tool is for a pure diastatic malt, not the LDM product that Tony G recommends) and to delete the volume measurements for the semolina. If Tony is using the LDM that Tony G recommends, he should use the gram value, although Norma did some measurements to convert the weight of a teaspoon of the LDM to a volume measurement and reported the conversion value elsewhere on the forum. If Tony is using another diastatic malt product, of which there are many versions and brands available, he should follow the use recommendations of the producer of that product.

What I ended up with is as follows:

Flour (100%): Water (61.81%): ADY (0.48565%): Salt (2.20751%): Olive Oil (1.10375%): LDM Diastatic Malt Powder (2.20751%): Poolish or Tiga Semolina (19.8675%): Total (187.68192%):

453 g  |  15.98 oz | 1 lbs 280 g  |  9.88 oz | 0.62 lbs 2.2 g | 0.08 oz | 0 lbs | 0.58 tsp | 0.19 tbsp 10 g | 0.35 oz | 0.02 lbs | 1.79 tsp | 0.6 tbsp 5 g | 0.18 oz | 0.01 lbs | 1.11 tsp | 0.37 tbsp 10 g | 0.35 oz | 0.02 lbs | 4 tsp | 1.33 tbsp 90 g | 3.17 oz | 0.2 lbs | 8.62 tbsp | 0.54 cups 850.2 g | 29.99 oz | 1.87 lbs | TF = N/A

To continue, as noted in Tony G's book, and as Mitch correctly pointed out, 13 ounces of dough are used to make a 13" pizza. As Mitch also correctly noted, that yields a thickness factor of 0.098 (or 0.097942 to be more exact).

To come up with the numbers for the two 16" pizzas that Tony would like to make, I entered the above value of thickness factor, the number and size of the pizzas, and the above baker's percents into the expanded dough calculating tool. Doing this, yielded the following:

Flour (100%): Water (61.81%): ADY (0.48565%): Salt (2.20751%): Olive Oil (1.10375%): LDM Diastatic Malt Powder (2.20751%): Poolish or Tiga Semolina (19.8675%): Total (187.68192%): Single Ball:

594.92 g  |  20.98 oz | 1.31 lbs 367.72 g  |  12.97 oz | 0.81 lbs 2.89 g | 0.1 oz | 0.01 lbs | 0.76 tsp | 0.25 tbsp 13.13 g | 0.46 oz | 0.03 lbs | 2.35 tsp | 0.78 tbsp 6.57 g | 0.23 oz | 0.01 lbs | 1.46 tsp | 0.49 tbsp 13.13 g | 0.46 oz | 0.03 lbs | 5.25 tsp | 1.75 tbsp 118.2 g | 4.17 oz | 0.26 lbs | 11.32 tbsp | 0.71 cups 1116.56 g | 39.38 oz | 2.46 lbs | TF = 0.097942 558.28 g | 19.69 oz | 1.23 lbs

Note: The dough is for two 16" pizzas; 25% of the 61.81% formula water, or 91.93 grams, is used to prehydrate the ADY and 75%, or 275.79 grams, is used as specified by Tony G in the recipe; the nominal thickness factor = 0.097942; no bowl residue compensation

What remains is to calculate the amount of water, flour and ADY to use for the poolish or biga. For example, if a poolish is to be used, the individual quantities given by Tony G in his book, at page 47, should be multiplied by 118.2/90 = 1.3133. The same calculation would be used for the ingredients used to make a tiga.

I believe that I got the numbers right but I welcome anyone to check them. I believe that Mitch is also right that the discrepancies between calculated and actual dough batch weights in Tony's book reflect the loss of some dough in the dough making process.

The above may seem a bit complicated but there will be some math involved no matter what calculation approach is used. The advantage of using the expanded dough calculating tool is that there is a formatting of the data in a way that allows printing it out and marking up the printout with the collateral calculations for the LDM and the poolish or biga.

Peter

[Essen1]

Hi Mike:

Of course that works, too!

A drop of caution - I recall that, when I first got the book, I found several discrepancies between the recipes in the book and the baker's percents in the back.   I do not remember if that was the case for the Master Dough with Starter.  Frankly, after spending too much time trying to make heads and tails from the chart vs. the actual recipes,  I just figured it would be something corrected in a later edition and I moved on. 

It is no big whoop to type in the recipe and come up with the actual baker's percents (which is what I do).  For this explanation, I deliberately stayed away from the baker's percents - only because I did not know what the OP knows or doesn't know about that and I did not want to assume (or try to figure it out).

Best,
Mitch

Mitch,

There were a bunch of corrections, mostly mentioned here:

http://www.thepizzabible.com/errata

But for the MD w/starter the only mention was in regards to the amount of pizzas that one particular recipe can make.

[Essen1]

Peter,

62% hydration seems a little low compared to TG's formula where the total hydration is listed at 65%. Did you calculate the water of the poolish into the formula as well or did you leave it out?

I was trying to find anything in the book where TG might have said to subtract certain amounts of flour, water and yeast from the dough's total amounts to make the poolish 18 hrs ahead but didn't find anything whatsoever.

So I my best guess is that TG simply added the entire amount of poolish seperately and the poolish itself is not part of the total MD formula.

[mitchjg]

Haha, and people I say I am geeky.  You work too hard, Peter! (and thank you for doing so much for everyone here).

I loved the precision in the thickness factor of .097942 vs. .098.  This is a difference of less than 6/100th of a percent.  Applying that to the total dough weight of 39.38 ounces yields a discrepancy of .02 ounces in the total dough.  I bet you can't find the extra dough driven by my math 

I do not think I could work with that many significant digits even if i used my trusty 4 foot Pickett Slide Ruler!


*********
Mike:  Thanks for the link.  I think I had seen most of them before.  I was actually addressing something different - aside from the deep dish Chicago correction, page 302 for some of the recipes did not make a lot of sense/did not match well.  I was referring to this:
http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php?topic=30759.msg346345#msg346345

******
in geekiness,
Mitch

[Essen1]

Haha, and people I say I am geeky.  You work too hard, Peter! (and thank you for doing so much for everyone here).

I loved the precision in the thickness factor of .097942 vs. .098.  This is a difference of less than 6/100th of a percent.  Applying that to the total dough weight of 39.38 ounces yields a discrepancy of .02 ounces in the total dough.  I bet you can't find the extra dough driven by my math 

I do not think I could work with that many significant digits even if i used my trusty 4 foot Pickett Slide Ruler!


*********
Mike:  Thanks for the link.  I think I had seen most of them before.  I was actually addressing something different - aside from the deep dish Chicago correction, page 302 for some of the recipes did not make a lot of sense/did not match well.  I was referring to this:
http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php?topic=30759.msg346345#msg346345

******
in geekiness,
Mitch

You guys are too hardcore for me...

[Pete-zza]

Haha, and people I say I am geeky.  You work too hard, Peter! (and thank you for doing so much for everyone here).

I loved the precision in the thickness factor of .097942 vs. .098.  This is a difference of less than 6/100th of a percent.  Applying that to the total dough weight of 39.38 ounces yields a discrepancy of .02 ounces in the total dough.  I bet you can't find the extra dough driven by my math 

I do not think I could work with that many significant digits even if i used my trusty 4 foot Pickett Slide Ruler!

Mitch

Mitch,

I go out several places in my numbers on purpose. It is for audit purposes in case I later have to revisit the matter after my memory of the matter has faded. To cite an example, today I edited three dough formulations in Reply 7 at http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php?topic=8100.msg69678#msg69678 because I discovered some errors due to my having originally posted an incorrect baker's percent for the olive oil. Had I rounded out the baker's percents originally, I would not have found the error. My audit of my original work found the error.

Peter

[Pete-zza]

Peter,

62% hydration seems a little low compared to TG's formula where the total hydration is listed at 65%. Did you calculate the water of the poolish into the formula as well or did you leave it out?

I was trying to find anything in the book where TG might have said to subtract certain amounts of flour, water and yeast from the dough's total amounts to make the poolish 18 hrs ahead but didn't find anything whatsoever.

So I my best guess is that TG simply added the entire amount of poolish seperately and the poolish itself is not part of the total MD formula.

Mike,

If you add about 47 grams to the formula flour weight and 47 grams to the formula water weight, as indicated for a poolish, the hydration value is around 65%.

But the above adjustment may also require that the baker's percents for the ADY, salt, LDM and olive oil also be adjusted. Tony notes this in the Pro Tip at the bottom of page 302. I will look into this tomorrow.

Peter

[Pete-zza]

This morning I went back to the dough formulations I posted in Reply 12 at http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php?topic=39124.msg391237#msg391237 to see if any adjustments were necessary to the quantities of any of the ingredients. As it turns out, because of the way I used the expanded dough calculating tool, the baker's percents I used are correct, as are the specific quantities. That is, there are 453 grams of flour, 280 grams of water, 10 grams of salt, 5 grams of olive oil, 10 grams of LDM and 90 grams of poolish or tiga. When the expanded dough calculating tool is used as described, those numbers are more important that the actual baker's percent numbers used in the tool. If I added the flour in the poolish to the basic 453 grams of flour in Tony G's recipe and recalculated the baker's percents for the salt, LDM and olive oil (the three ingredients mentioned in the Pro Tip at the bottom of page 302), their respective baker's percents would become 2%, 2% and 1%. Those are the numbers shown in the baker's percent chart at page 302. Interestingly, the Pro Tip does not say anything about adjusting the ADY to reflect the yeast in the poolish (or tiga, if used). I don't think it makes a lot of difference because the amount of yeast in the poolish or biga is small, and with rounding those differences essentially disappear.

Working with and explaining recipes using commercial leavened preferments like poolish and tiga is not an easy chore. And I am sure that in writing the book, Tony G intentionally used only a single recipe for his master dough with starter. He did not want to get into how to take his recipe and modify it along the lines that Tony Pizzeria requested. To demonstrate how tricky the math can become when using commercially leavened preferments, see Reply 62 at http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php?topic=9908.msg86667#msg86667. All of those numbers would have to be reworked, by hand using pencil and paper and a calculator, if the amount of preferment or the number of dough balls or the size of the pizzas were to be changed. Tony G would have opened up a can of worms had he decided to tell readers of his book how to change the amount of dough to fit any specific requirement of the readers, such as specific weights or numbers of dough balls, specific numbers of pizzas, specific pizza sizes, different thickness factors, etc. He does give baker's percents at page 302 but one would have to know how to use those percents in the context of his recipes to modify the recipes to meet particular needs. They might also need to know the basics of thickness factors.

Unless I made an error somewhere, which is always a possibility when working with lots of numbers and doing a lot of calculations, I believe that the method I described in Reply 12 does what Tony Pizzeria wants even though that method only occurred to me yesterday. But, even then, a bit of math is required on the part of the user. Finally, using the expanded dough calculating tool as described also allows the user to specify bowl residue compensation values. I think that Tony G smartly dodged that issue by giving what appears to be the weights of dough batches and poolish/tiga after they have been made.

Peter