5
A couple of pies from Friday evening's bake out of the Ardore. Pistachio pesto and sausage and Sicilian inspired fried eggplant, with sauteed red onion, fresh mozzarella, and ricotta. Since I had the guests coming that evening, for some insurance that I wouldn't have any issues (some flavor too, suppose) I blended in 5% Caputo type 1, and 5% Super Nuvola to go with the 90% Caputo Pizzeria 00. The average room temperature overall was probably around 72 F in the 24 hours. Went ahead with 4% starter and 65% hydration, and 3% salt. This was probably around hour 26 or 27 from the initial mixing which I did by hand.
I had the oven off for a bit and around hour 29, one of the guests who was in learning mode, wanted to make a Margherita so I fired up the oven again. The guest did an okay job stretching (I had to help with the final stretch to get the dough to reach close to the ends of the peel), and launched the pizza, but asked me to rotate. So hour 29 plus the pizza ended up fine (no photo) so not sure if the little bit of stronger flour made a difference or even if the flour was 100% 00, perhaps I still had much more time to work before the dough became much more difficult to work with.
Next experiment (for myself) I'll go back to all 100% 00 flour and perhaps reduce salt to around 2.5% and see what effect, if any, that has. In my 5 years of doing this (and not even 6 months yet of sourdough experiments), I've also used 3% salt only because that was a guideline but I never questioned the reasons beyond flavor in the dough. My understanding now is that it can speed up fermentation with less salt and perhaps also make the stretching easier so it will be interesting to find out if this is the case in that next experiment.
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