Shrekpower,
Your baguettes look very good!! And thanks for the link.
So there's also 75% hydration in your pizza dough? Isn't it too hard to handle? 75% starts to be on the high side.
You also baked the pizza with steam in the oven?
What about the pizza place, did they also use steam? And such a long bake?
You are more than welcome for the link my friend. The dough is quite hard to manipulate and it's a pain in the ass. I find it a bit gummy and also not super elastic. But to be quite honest with you, it's all part of the learning process and experiments. My new mission is to make the dough easier to deal with. Maybe adding oil? decrease hydration a bit, things like that... I know nothing about science behind it, I learn by doing even if it takes longer!
Como Restaurants use conveyor belt ovens.. People will probably call me crazy lol but yes I used steam to bake the pizza. I just kept what worked well to make the baguette in the first place, I thought to just replicate the same formula with my pizza dough. Here's a brief description what I found on google what steam does to your baking process : "Steam helps keep the crust soft during the first five or ten minutes so the loaf can get that final expansion. It also helps dissolve sugars on the surface of the dough that caramelize during baking and give you a glossy, crisp crust."
One day I found a cook from Como and he told me this : bakery flour with fresh yeast and lots of salt for a good dough ... the oven cooks the pizza at 475 F for 7 minutes.
The temperature of your water must be almost perfect to avoid that your dough sticks or makes lumps (tempered by feeling at 25C, is slightly warmer than body temperature)
In Como, always refrigerate the dough in individual portions well formed into a ball before kneading it.
To be quite honest, I don't really know if he was being honest or not since it was through a facebook conversation. He might have just told me BS stuff to not share their secrets. My personal feeling is that he was telling the truth, but again, there is NO WAY the pizza in my oven would be cooked after 7 minutes... Conveyor belt oven pizza VS Home oven is 2 different world my friend. With the conveyor belt oven, the food is cooked using
forced air impingement, radiant heat, or infrared heat.Btw, I speak french, I'm from south shore Montreal, Canada. Not sure about you ? I saw your location : A French in China!
If you speak french : Bien content de faire ta connaissance mon ami!
