I really hope someone here can help. My pizza’s are not rising, and my pizza rolls in particular are coming out flat and lifeless, to the point of me having to remove them from the menu.
Below are all the details of my problem…If you have any thoughts or suggestions I would be most grateful…
Problem Details…
My 1400 series Lincoln Impinger II recently died; shutting me down for a week. It had given over 12 years service and churned out the most fantastic thin crust pizzas. I have just bought a 1300 series because I was assured that it would produce the very same quality product only that the output rate would be different. It can produce 20 x 12" per hour as opposed to 35 x 12" per hour of the 1400.
My 1400 had a 28" baking chamber and ran at 290 degrees Celsius or around 550 Fahrenheit and the conveyor was set at 4 mins 15 seconds.
My 1300 has a 20" chamber and is set at 288 degrees Celsius with a cooking time of 4 mins 15 seconds also. Although the pizza tastes almost exactly the same the base does not rise, and will not stay crispy long enough.
I have experimented on changing the conveyor speed and temp but nothing seems to get the base to rise like it did…I haven’t tried to change the 1300’s finger configuration as I have no Idea what to do…
Does it need more heat from the bottom or the top, at the start of the baking process or more heat at the end…help…
Am I fooling myself? Or was I fooled…can a 20" chamber really produce the same results as 28" chamber.
Thanks to all for reading…I look forward to any help or insight you can give.
Thanks a million for getting back to me so quickly guys.
I will experiment with a new/different yeast and hope that is all that it is. However the problem is that in our other pizzeria, which uses the 1400 series Lincoln and uses the same base is delivering a different result. The Pizza rolls especially. I am pulling my hair out at this stage.
Has this occured on more than one batch of dough? We had something similar happen a couple of years ago and discovered that the guy making the dough had started using really hot water to disolve the yeast faster… with the result that he was killing the yeast. Most hot tap water is hot enough to do this.
A new oven or change in settings might change the way the dough rises… how fast, how far etc, but I don’t see it eliminating the rise alltogether which is what your description sounds like.
I’m betting that there is a problem withthe finger configuration of your “new” oven. My guess is that it is not the same, as that of your old oven. When you say “new” didi you buy the oven new from Lincoln? Or, is this a new oven to you that you bought from someone else? If you bought it from Lincoln, you should have never accepted the oven until it baked YOUR pizzas to YOUR satisfaction. I think a call in to Lincoln is in order. You say that the new oven gives a product that looks the same, but is limp, and doesn’t rise as it did in your old oven, and the baking time is essentially the same. It sounds like you’re getting too much heat, possibly too fast, to the bottom of the pizza. If you still have the old oven, pull the top and bottom finger panels and compare them to what your new oven has and get back to me.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor
We make our dough in one batch and distribute it to our two pizza places. The place that is using the 1400 has no problem, and I had no problem until I turned on the new 1300 oven.
We add our yeast to 38 degree Celsius / 100 Fahrenheit water, or at least we should be doing so. I’m making the base myself tonight with a new batch of yeast just to be sure.
If there is still a problem tomorrow they said they can send out a repair guy just to look over the oven tomorrow, make sure all is well there.
I have bought the oven but have been given a month’s trial to see if I was happy with it, as it smaller than the 1400 I and the business am used to.
It’s a new oven to me, but not brand new. It is a reconditioned unit bought from the equipment group who service Lincoln here in Ireland. They have been great so far in trying to save my old 1400. And if at the end of the month I am unhappy with their 1300 they will replace, fix or put my money towards a 1400.
I came to PMQ to make sure that the 1300 should be able to do the very same job as the 1400 excluding capacity. If its 20" chamber can cook as well as my old 1400’s 28" chamber. And by the sounds of it should. Sorry for my naivety but I’ve only ever worked with the 1400’s.
As for the fingers in my old unit….I don’t have that machine to hand any longer, but I do have the working 1400 in our other shop which I can compare the 1300’s finger config to. I’ll get at them and have a look.
If the dough is working fine at one location and not at another, your problem is not yeast. Tom is right, the oven should be able to be configured to work.
So the dough is rising… but not the same as before. In your initial post it sounded like the dough was not rising at all… Sorry I mis-read it.
One thing to keep in mind about these smaller ovens is that with fewer finger panels, the finger configuration can be much more critical than it is with the larger ovens. Many times there ovens are used to reheat slices, and when buying a used/reconditioned one, to bake a pizza from raw, you end up finding that it doesn’t work well at all. Nothing wrong with the ovenitself, it’s just profiled incorrectly for what you want it to do.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor
Thanks for all your feedback. Seems to have been a mixture of a few things. One of the fingers was misaligned which wasn’t helping, but, (and this is where I have to eat my hat), when I went in to make the dough myself I found that the yeast was from a different supplier. The pizza’s that were meant to be from the same batch had been made with the remainder of the old yeast…
Sorry…
Anyway, Iam glad in a way that it happened, because it lead me here to this site and into the think thank…a fantastic resource I never would have even known about.