When are you gonna make the pizza(s), Nate?
I made another batch of dough yesterday, with Power flour, using
the same formula I used the previous day with Mondako. Both of those doughs are in the fridge. I don't intend to use the Mondako dough until at least tomorrow (3 days), and I don't intend to use the Power flour dough until at least the following day. I'm really curious to find out how the Power flour dough turns out. They're both fermenting in a bag, in the same condition as when I took the dough out of the mixer bowl. Even though neither batch of dough has noticeably risen so far, I'm debating whether I should punch down the dough and agitate it a little before I scale it into dough balls, in an effort to create a more complex gluten structure (or to kinda simulate scrap dough). Even though I now know I was off on my ADY-to-IDY conversions the first few times I used IDY, and even though my latest conversion should be accurate, I'm still not real confident that my IDY is in the best condition. At least I know it works, though.
I made a pseudo deep dish pizza last night, using four different pieces of scrap dough for lamination. I think two of the pieces of dough were scraps of scraps of Giordano's style dough (yes, scraps of scraps), and I think the other two pieces of dough were Tommy's scraps (which I thought were Giordano's style scraps when I took them out of the fridge). I flattened each piece of dough by hand and dipped one side of each piece into a bowl of flour, then stacked the pieces in this order: Tommy's/Giordano's/Tommy's/Giordano's (or possibly the opposite order). Rolled without bench flour until the dough was about TF=0.105, then formed it to fit the pan and trimmed. Cheese, pepperoni, sauce. Baked 25 minutes at 450.
I took some pictures, but I haven't processed them yet. Not sure if the pics show anything relevant, but I'm sure Nate will probably want to see them, since I used four laminates.
Also, I received a little gift from someone yesterday. It was a message that contained some information about Giordano's dough and sauce from the mid-70s. I have every reason to believe it's real/reliable. The information suggests that the hydration for their dough, at least in that era, was around 58%, rather than the 48% I've found seems to work well (which is based entirely on contemporary Giordano's videos). Also, the
cake yeast percentage was very low (like 0.22%), which translates to about 0.07% IDY. That's tiny, and it suggests to me that, if correct, they probably used to make dough in the evening and let it ferment at room temperature all night for use all day the next day.
Aside from those two things, the formula is very similar to what I've been using. One notable exception: The info I received suggests there was about 1.25% sugar in the dough. And even though the list of ingredients Peter received from Giordano's a few years ago doesn't list sugar, it's not hard for me to believe that there is sugar in their dough. All you have to do is compare the color of my crust to the color of their crust. Excluding
my first one (which contained 2% sugar), my attempted clones have been much whiter than most pictures of Giordano's pizzas.
The fat percentage in this new information was almost identical to what I've been using (though in a different form), as was the salt percentage. Also, it mentioned Ceresota flour.
So there appears to be three main differences between my dough and Giordano's dough from the mid-70s: Giordano's apparently used considerably more water, considerably less yeast, and
some sugar. I feel very confident speculating that their dough's yeast percentage has increased significantly since then, for many reasons. I also feel pretty confident speculating that their dough's hydration percentage has decreased considerably since then. I don't think the sugar discrepancy is a big deal, so I will add maybe 1% sugar to my next batch of dough.