made my first pizza today, question.

Pizza Shop Talk The Think Tank
21

I use sugar in all of my doughs. Sugar feeds yeast - making it more active and quicker to develop. Some think adding sugar is unnecessary. Try both ways.

I use semolina in my Chicago style dough because it gives it that more coarse texture that I find desirable. I do not think it would be good in a New York style crust. Your “bite” in the crust should be inherent in the way you cook it. The best NY style crusts I have had have a slightly crispy and chewy outside with a thin soft bread like layer above that. I assume you are using a home oven. If so, put your stone all the way to the bottom. If you have a covered element, you don’t even need a rack. Set the oven (on bake NOT convection) as high as it will go (probably 500) and let it heat for at least an hour. Skip the screen that is recommended in your book for now. You want to wick as much moisture from the bottom of the crust as is possible. Sometimes I even open the oven door to fool the oven into cycling on.

Start out by trying the pizza on your home ovens highest setting. If that is too hot, turn it down a little for the next one.

Next, sauce is important. You will not find a good tomatoe in the grocery store. Escalon’s 6-n-1’s are available in small cans at specialty stores. Otherwise, find someone with a rest. depot membership and try out some of the escalon and stanislaus products to find one you like. I think a good start is mixing 6-n-1’s or full red with the stanislaus fully prepared. Spice it up a bit and see what you think. You will waste a lot of tomatoes by cooking at home. But that sauce recipe in the “Ultimate” book is garbage (ketchupy, yuck!).

I hope this helps. I’ve made lots of home pies (probably 500-700 in the past year). So I’ve made lots of mistakes and lots of terrible tasting pies. For whatever reason, I’ve found NY style to be the least forgiving even though it seems the simplest. Good luck.

22

Tom can correct me on this, but I do not think that Freddy’s dough formulation as presently constituted is a particularly good candidate for commercial use. For example, I estimate that Freddy’s recipe calls for over 6% sugar (as a percent of the combined weight of high-gluten flour and semolina). Sugar at that level is likely to lead to premature or excessive bottom crust browning if the pizzas are baked directly on a hot deck oven stone surface and possibly even in a home pizza stone application. I also estimate that the recipe calls for over 1.5% IDY. That is high for a cold fermented dough in a commercial volume situation. If I am not mistaken, The Ultimate Pizza Manual was written to instruct users to make pizzas at home. Using the pizza screen would make sense with the amount of sugar called for in Freddy’s recipe.

Some pizza operators who make the NY style use semolina flour as part of the total formula flour. Using up to about 25% of the blend is fairly typical (Freddy’s dough recipe uses 27%). I am aware of an operator who used 50% semolina for the NY style. Too much semolina can lead to a leathery crust, especially upon cooling.

I calculated that Freddy’s high-gluten/semolina blend has an effective protein content of about 13.7% (this assumes 14% protein for the high-gluten flour and 12.9% for the semolina). That places the blend protein-wise between bread flour and high-gluten flour. That should make a decent NY style.

PN

23

Thats interesting information. So for a commercial conveyor oven the recipe should have less sugar in it? How much less sugar would you put in for a commercial oven?

What else would change for a commercial oven?