Dalibor;
In order to achieve a longer frozen shelf life your dough will need to be blast frozen either mechanically at -30 to -35F with 600 to 800 linear feet of air flow, or cryogenically at -60 to -65F. This should get you into the 6 to 8-week shelf life range, to go beyond this, you will need to work with ingredients (high protein flour and fresh, well maintained yeast, plus oxidants such as ascorbic acid, enzymatic oxidation, and possibly azodicarbonamide ADA). This should get you into the 10 to 12-week shelf life range, and with a high level of control over packaging, distribution, storage, and display/marketing of the frozen dough, you might be able to push into the 14 to 16-week shelf life range. While this may sound to be quite easy, it is really a very sizeable challange to accomplish, and expensive too if you are talking about doing any sizeable quantity of dough. With regard to equipment, aside from the freezer, you most important piece of equipment will be your dough mixer, it will need to be a horizontal mixer, with dual drive, from both ends of the agitator shaft, and it must have a direct expansion, refrigerated bowl, with a three arm agitator and a refrigerated breaker bar. If possible, the bowl ends should also be refrigerated. The mixer will need to be specifically built for mixing of frozen doughs. All of this is critical to the production of long shelf life frozen dough as finished dough temperature wil be targeted at 65F, with a variable tolerance of just +/- 1F. To keep mixing times within reason while mixing these cold doughs, you will need to use some type of reducing agent in the dough such as L-cysteine or glutathione/dead yeast. Failure to maintain these conditions, can lead to unexpected loss of dough performance, which in the case of frozen dough, could involve as much as two or more months of production, a sizeable loss. This is why producing long shelf life frozen dough is so expensive, and represents such a significant challange. By the way, going back to those finished dough temperatures, and doughs that are outside of the tolerance range must be discarded as they will pose a potential for future failure. My personal approach has always been to tell anyone interested in getting into long shelf life frozen dough production is that you MUST do everything by the numbers, with no compromises, if you can’t commit to doing that, then you should not get into this type of production as it will come back to haunt you and eventually put you out of business as you listen to your customers complain about poor dough performance, or watch the dough fail in the market place.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor