Hi Tom,
I am about to open my first pizza place in about two weeks. I am using a premixed pizza flour (just add water) from Roma Foods for my hand tossed dough. I am having some trouble with it. I like the flavor of it, but don’t like the apperance. I proof the dough balls in the cooler overnight, I use a sheeter and then dock it. When it comes out of the oven the crust looks dry and bland. Sometimes it has more of bread like taste. I am having trouble with consistancy. I have tried it with a garlic butter spead around the edge of the crust before I bake it, that turned out the best, but it is time consuming. Do have any suggestion on how to get a better crust. or should I just make my own with your old faithful. Thanks
Scott Chapman
Great Scott’s Pizza
Scott;
Keep in mind that sheeting the dough skin to full diameter does very little for the overall appearance of the finished crust, unless you really want the flatter profile provided by the sheeting process. You might try sheeting the dough skin out to about 2 to 3 inches smaller than the desired finished size and then hand stretch to the desired finished size. This will allow for a much better edge rise and it really does a lot for the appearance of the finished crust. We just finished with a training program on pizza poroduction last week and demonstrated this to our student. He never made pizza, much less shaped a dough skin before coming to us for training, and inside of 30 minutes he was sheeting the dough balls to 9 inches and finishing them by hand stretching to 12 inches like an “old pro”. The finished crusts had a great appearance too, much better than those which were fully formed by sheeting. If the dough is a bit too tight to hand stretch don’t be afraid to add a little additional water to the dough to loosen it up a bit.
Additionally, don’t over dock the dough skin. Just a single pass over the entire dough surface is all that should be needed. To help flavor the crust you can brush it with olive oil, or a flavored olive oil either before baking or right after baking. Melted butter or a blend of butter and olive oil or just plain vegetable oil works well too. It really shouldn’t take much effort to give the edge a quick brushing of the flavored oil.
As to making your own dough from scratch, it’s easy. There are any number of great formulas in the RECIPE BANK. All you will need for ingredients are yeast, flour, oil/olive oil, salt and water. Sugar might be needed if you are using certain types of conveyor ovens, but generally it is an optional ingredient. You could make a “goodie bag” containing the salt, (sugar if used), instant dry yeast, and a pound or so of flour. Then all you would need to do is to add this to a bag of flour and add the water and oil. From there on it should be business as normal as far as dough handling is concerned.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor
Thanks Tom,
I am sheeting and stretching the dough as you described. I did find that I was over docking the dough. I also wasn’t oiling the dough balls after I put them in the dough trays. After spraying the dough with an olive oil spray, and not over docking I was able to get the crust I was looking for. Thanks Again