?_Lehmann: Strange Dough Results

[system]

Tom,

I have encountered some strage results with my dough. We handtoss our dough and bake in a conveyor oven. Our dough is typically 2 days old when we use it and allow it to proof at room temp for an hour or so before we use it. Nothing odd about our recipe, Hi-Gluten flour, 56% water content, soybean oil, sugar, salt, and instant yeast.

We did an experiment using a rolling pin to roll out the dough rather than tossing it by hand as we are having trouble with the trainees getting a consitant dough tossed out.

The rolled dough was actually much more tender, airier, crispier, and had a very nice open cell structure throughout the pizza.

The dough tossed by hand was dense, chewy, tough and had a much more noticable gum line to it.

I have done the experiment several times with batches from different days, using dough 1-3 days old, with different topping combinations and still get the same results.

From what I have read - shouldn’t the opposite be happening? I would appreciate any thoughts or comments.

Thanks,

Michael

 

[system]

Michael;
You’re right, I too would expect to see just the opposite results. We just finished two weeks of pizza training seminars here and we demonstrated the use of a rolling pin to help open the dough up so it could be finished by hand stretching/tossing. In all cases this gave us a much more uniform dough thickness when processed by novices than opening the entire dough ball up by hand. When we formed the entire dough skin to size using just the rolling pin we began putting a lot of work into the dough and it became more difficult to achieve the last inch or so of size than when we finished the dough by hand. In this case, we were able to fully shape the dough easier using the dough sheeter but the resulting crust had a very flat profile, good if that is what you are looking for, but we were looking for a nice light textured edge. Also, when a rolling pin is operated by a relative novice, there is a tendency to roll the pin off of the edge of the dough skin during the forming operation. This further reduces the edge thickness to provide the finished crust with what we fondly call a knife edge. When used correctly, the rolling pin should never be allowed to roll off of the dough skin, instead, it is lifted off of the dough skin as the pin approached the edge of the dough.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor