Ask Tom Lehmann a Question

Hello, can i first say that the dedication that is put into this forum to help folks like me in their quest is very inspiring.

I have worked in an independent bakery for a couple of years and have recently set up my own WFO pizza business. I hope that soon i will be working at music/food festivals, with this in mind i have a few questions which i hope you help me with. I currently make a NP style pizza which nods its head in the direction of the Neapolitan pizza. My procedure so far has worked quite well for me in that I mix the dough, ball it, and store in plastic containers in the fridge for two days before i make any pizzas. I use a sourdough starter in my dough recipe, however, i have been informed that SD does not like such varying temperatures (coming from mixer to fridge to ambient). Apparently the cold fermentation method inhibits on flavour and texture, whilst an ambient is superior in these aspects? I have been thinking on methods that i can employ to transport my dough and store it on site. As i will be travelling for a couple of hours and then storing the dough for two - three days at the venue, taking into account varying external temperatures, spatial issues, controlling dough temperature…using a warm rise method in this situation would be impossible…wouldn’t it?

I have been wracking my brain to try an conjure up a method of transporting my dough whilst controlling temperature if i am able to use an ambient rise? The only solution i can come up with is to use refrigeration throughout the whole process as this obviously negates the temperature controlling issue. i know that a lot of other traders make their dough up on the day and roll it out with a pin; this is something that i don’t want to resort to this as i have a passion for doing this to the best of my abilities. Could you impart your wisdom on this please.

as mentioned, as of yet, i have not employed a bulk fermentation into my procedure as the dough is balled up straight from the mixer and into the fridge. Am i losing out on anything as a result of omitting a bulk fermentation?

Many thanks for you time

Darren
 
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Hello Tom.

I am a ‘rookie’ deep dish maker and I have been very happy with the taste of my pizzas but now I would really like to focus on the presentation. I have noticed that when I take them out of the oven and cut into the Chicago Style deep dish pizzas, I get a water build up on the top. This is the case for my meat AND only cheese pizzas. I was wondering if my sauce is too watery or maybe too much cheese. Again, it tastes wonderful but it is a bit messy. Any suggestions. BTW- I use 6 -in-1 Crushed Tomatoes with a bit of seasoning for the sauce. Thanks!
 
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Bill;
Good choice for your sauce, hopefully you are not adding any water to it. You don’t provide me with much information to work with so I’ll have to make an educated guess that possibly you are not baking the pizzas long enough. Chicago style deep-dish pizzas are best when baked for 40 to 45-minutes. What are the baking conditions you are presently using? How much sauce and cheese for what size pan? What color is your D-D pan?
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor
 
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Bill;
Good choice for your sauce, hopefully you are not adding any water to it. You don’t provide me with much information to work with so I’ll have to make an educated guess that possibly you are not baking the pizzas long enough. Chicago style deep-dish pizzas are best when baked for 40 to 45-minutes. What are the baking conditions you are presently using? How much sauce and cheese for what size pan? What color is your D-D pan?
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor
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Hello Tom

Thank you so much for your reply. OK. So, for a pair of 9" deep dish pizzas, I use a 28oz can of 6-in-1. I line the bottom of the dough with a layer of mozzarella and sprinkle some shredded as well. (A total of about 2 Cups). I cook them for about 40 minutes in a regular gas oven at 450 degrees. I do not cover them with foil. I am also not adding any water to the sauce. The pans are grey Chefmates. Can I get away with cooking longer? I also placethe pans on the lower racks of the oven. Crust seems fine but I am sure if I cooked longer it wouldn’t affect the darkness to much and if it did, it seems like it would be okay. Thanks again for any thoughts and insights.
 
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Darren;
Do you add any yeast to your dough formula? If you do you are not making a true sourdough, so you have a free hand in managing your dough in the beast way to meet your specific needs. As you have concluded, that is to hold the dough under refrigeration. For a “true” sourdough without any added yeast, you might consider bulk fermenting the dough at ambient temperature for 24 to 36-hours to develop the flavor, then mixing the dough once again, just enough to smooth it out, scale and ball it, then allow to ferment again at ambient for about 2-hours, then transfer it into the cooler for 24-hours before transporting it to the use site. Store the dough in the cooler at point of use and work out a management schedule that will allow you to bring the dough balls out of the cooler about 3-hours before anticipated use. If your dough has added yeast in it mix the dough without yeast, only the sourdough starter for fermentation, and bulk ferment as described above, then remix the dough with the yeast. Just mix the dough until smooth, immediately scale and ball, take directly to the cooler for 18 to 24-hours, transport to point of use. To use the dough, remove dough from cooler about 3-hours prior to anticipated use or allow the dough to temper to 50F, then open into pizza skins as needed.
You might try this as a starting point.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor
 
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Bill;
Good choice for your sauce, hopefully you are not adding any water to it. You don’t provide me with much information to work with so I’ll have to make an educated guess that possibly you are not baking the pizzas long enough. Chicago style deep-dish pizzas are best when baked for 40 to 45-minutes. What are the baking conditions you are presently using? How much sauce and cheese for what size pan? What color is your D-D pan?
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor
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I am thinking a lighter color pan will allow me to cook the pizza longer. Does that seem true?
 
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Hi Tom,

As I’m sure you’ve heard many times before… We are opening a pizza shop and are in the market for a mixer. We have these two options for mixers at the moment. I was hoping to pick your brain and see which one you would opt for… an ABSFBM-50 Spiral Dough Mixer or a planetary mixer? Any tips or advise would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Brie
 
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Bill;
Good choice for your sauce, hopefully you are not adding any water to it. You don’t provide me with much information to work with so I’ll have to make an educated guess that possibly you are not baking the pizzas long enough. Chicago style deep-dish pizzas are best when baked for 40 to 45-minutes. What are the baking conditions you are presently using? How much sauce and cheese for what size pan? What color is your D-D pan?
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor
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Hello Tom- So I sent the following post a while back and I did cook longer and the results were a little better. So here is what I was doing and any feedback would be greatly appreciated!! Thanks!

Thank you so much for your reply. OK. So, for a pair of 9" deep dish pizzas, I use a 28oz can of 6-in-1. I line the bottom of the dough with a layer of mozzarella and sprinkle some shredded as well. (A total of about 2 Cups). I cook them for about 40 minutes in a regular gas oven at 450 degrees. I do not cover them with foil. I am also not adding any water to the sauce. The pans are grey Chefmates. Can I get away with cooking longer? I also place the pans on the lower racks of the oven. Crust seems fine but I am sure if I cooked longer it wouldn’t affect the darkness to much and if it did, it seems like it would be okay. Thanks again for any thoughts and insights.
 
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Hey tom, I currently make all my pies on screens, to order. We are becoming very busy and am looking for a way to be able to pre stretch skins ahead of time. Obviously we can’t on the screen because in a short amount of time the dough seeps into the holes and sticks when baked. I’d hate to use aluminum pans as I don’t want the “fried” crust taste. What other options could I try. Thought about the aluminum disc but they have larger holes which I feel would still cause a problem. Thanks for your help.
 
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One thing to try is to place the opened skins onto aluminum coupe style pans and store in wire tree rack in the cooler, when you need to use, just remover from the cooler about 15-minutes before anticipated use, invert onto a floured work surface, just as you would if you were opening the dough for the first time, then give the skin a little touch-up and place onto the baking screen for dressing and baking. Another thing you might look at is to open the dough up to just short of full diameter, place a piece of lightly oiled parchment paper on an extra screen, place the skin on the parchment paper followed by another piece of oiled parchment paper, continue to build a stack of skins in this manner to not more than 8 to 10 high, build your “ready to use” inventory in this manner and store in a rack in the cooler, be sure to cover with a food contact approved plastic bag to prevent drying. To use, remove from the cooler about 15-minutes before anticipated use, remove a skin from the stack and finish opening the skin to full diameter by hand stretching, then place onto the baking screen for dressing and baking.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor
 
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Hey Tom,
Home baker here but I hope you’ll be able to help. I’ve been using your NY style pizza recipe for years, and just recently aquired a blackstone pizza oven, with the hopes of using it to serve pizza at a friends wedding. So I don’t have to go through the work of stretching fresh dough on the day of, I’d like to parbake a ton of crusts to use so I can quickly top and bake them to keep the food line moving. I saw a post from ages ago that said you recommended using gums or potato flour in the crust to try and retain the moisture. I found some potato flour today at the local bulk store but I don’t exactly know what to to with it. I was just wondering if you could go through your parbake crust process or give any pointers in terms of percentages for adding potato flour to parbaked crusts. Thanks so much!
 
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Tom Out here on the west coast thin crust is very popular. In particular a crust that is rolled through a dough sheeter, It is then dusted with flour folded in half lengthwise and run through again this is done 3 or 4 times to create a bunch of thin layers. When I have seen it done the dough looks very dry like maybe 35-40% water.
after the final rolling they cut out the skins with a template the size of a pizza and stack em up.
I have looked around here and have never found a dough recipe matching this. Oh yeah one more thing when rolled out the dough has a slight bit of yellow tint to it not much just a bit.

Any ideas? Thanks
 
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Warren;
What you are looking at is a cracker type crust. I have a dough formula for that type of crust in the PMQ Recipe Bank <www.pmq.com>. The slight yellow color to the dough is from the addition of durum semolina flour (to replace about 20% of the total flour weight). Be careful if you try to add more than 25% replacement as it will result in a finished crust that will be so tough and chewy after sitting out for a while that you will think shoe leather is more tender.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor
 
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Warren;
What you are looking at is a cracker type crust. I have a dough formula for that type of crust in the PMQ Recipe Bank <www.pmq.com>. The slight yellow color to the dough is from the addition of durum semolina flour (to replace about 20% of the total flour weight). Be careful if you try to add more than 25% replacement as it will result in a finished crust that will be so tough and chewy after sitting out for a while that you will think shoe leather is more tender.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor
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Thanks Tom, I found that recipe after I made this post. regarding the Durum flour I don’t remember seeing that in your Recipe But its Ironic that the place I was referring too has been there 39 years and in the last 10 started to go down hill everyone I have talked to says the same thing the crust isn’t what it used to be there is ZERO oven spring and never a single bubble . I realize you don’t get much spring from a cracker as its meant to be thin, but I was wondering if they had gone to frozen prebake like the chains, until I went in the other day and saw they were still making it in house. Any thoughts on using/ not using Durum as part of it?
 
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Here’s a thought, the use of durum flour was suggested for inclusion in the dough formula that I provided because you mentioned the yellow tint of the dough. Now, consider this, durum flour is somewhat more coarse than regular flour so it hydrates much more slowly, if they are adding water to the dough just until the dough feels “right”, by the time the dough is ready for the oven the durum flour has had sufficient time to fully hydrate, in doing so it will cause the dough to become stiffer/tighter and resist oven spring during the early stage of baking, resulting in a flat crust that is also pretty dense too. We see this happening with pizzas made using whole-wheat flour when a soaker is not used with the whole-wheat flour to allow it to fully hydrate prior to baking. This might be what you are seeing or hearing about.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor
 
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Hi Tom. My question is simply why is it important to control dough temperature during mixing and kneading. The finished dough is headed for the refrigerator anrway, right?
 
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Great question John;
The finished dough temperature is important for a number of reasons. Once the dough is mixed it should be taken directly to the bench for scaling and balling. It is important that the dough be completely scaled, balled and in the cooler within 20-minutes of the end of mixing. This is important because the yeast goes through a short (approximately 20-minute) lag phase during which it is minimally active, but after that things kick into high gear and the yeast begins to actively ferment the dough. The fermentation process changes the density of the dough due to the development of gas bubbles within the dough additionally, these gas bubbles continue to grow/expand resulting from the development of carbon dioxide by the yeast. If the dough is too warm the yeast will be more active and if too cold less active so the dough temperature must be controlled to have some control over dough density as it goes to the cooler. Why is this important? It’s important because the dough density has a great impact upon the rate at which the dough is cooled. Dense dough is more easily cooled than gassy or less dense dough. When we take the dough to the cooler we expect that it will be cooled to a point where the rate of fermentation is controlled, allowing us to hold the dough in the cooler for several days or more without it blowing, but if the dough is so warm that the control temperature is not reached within the cross-stack time the boxes are down-stacked and sealed closed with too much heat remaining in the dough, hence the dough continues to ferment even while it is boxed in the cooler, add to this what we call heat of fermentation/heat of metabolism which creates about 1F of temperature every hour that the dough is actively fermenting and you can see how the dough can quickly get out of hand in the cooler resulting in a total loss of the dough by the following day. The other reason for controlling the finished/mixed dough temperature is that the warmer the dough is going into the cooler the longer it will need to be cross-stacked if we are to have any chance of stabilizing the dough so it can be held in the cooler for any significant length of time without it blowing or at least, over fermenting with a shorter than anticipated refrigerated life. Add to all of that the fact that you cannot have effective dough management without good time and temperature controls.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor
 
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Hey Tom!

I manage a pizza restaurant in central WA and recently decided to revamp our dough recipe, using the ratios found here:
. 50lb of flour is set to 100% making the required yeast 3 oz. Here is my question: I made a batch of that dough, it was balled and rotated to the walk in, in about 22 minutes. By this morning (less than 24 hours), it was completely blown. Lifted a whole stack of dough trays with it. The only thing that was not done was cross stacking, we dont have the space to do that currently. Was this the cause of the dough blowing? I even tried to anticipate the temp difference and finished dough temp was about 80 deg F, maybe a little cooler. So without cross stacking, what could be done to create a superior dough? Our current recipe only calls for 4tsp, ~.75oz, of yeast. The previous owners designed the current dough recipe, and it doesnt seem to be quite right looking at all the recipes I have seen for pizza dough. Help a young pizza professional out!

Thanks!
Jason
 
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Jason;
Should all of my questions be so easy to answer. In fact, I didn’t answer it, you did when you said that you didn’t cross-stack the dough boxes. That’s the reason why the dough “blew” during the night. Colder dough isn’t the answer, the options that you have available if you don’t have room to cross-stack is to use an end to end off-set stacking pattern (You’ve got to allow for ventilation of heat out of the boxes, or you see what happens. The other option is to oil the dough balls and drop them into individual plastic food bags, twist the open end into a pony tail to close then tuck the pony tail (DO NOT TIE) under the dough ball as you place it onto an aluminum sheet pan, then place directly into your cooler in a pan rack with a 5" spacing between the shelf brackets. With this method there is no need to cross-stack. A variation of this method is to place the dough balls directly onto a very lightly oiled sheet pan and place then in the rack in the cooler allowing then to remain uncovered for 3-hours, then slip a large plastic bag over each pan of dough balls, folding the bottom opening of the bag up over the leading edge of the dough balls and then pull the top opening of the bag down to completely cover the front of the pan and tuck the edges under the sheet pan to secure.
If you have any questions, please free free to contact me directly at 785-537-1037 and I’ll be glad to walk you through it.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor
 
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So - apparently there are a million sources that explain that if dough is not baked at a high enough temperature, for a long enough time, potassium bromate will remain… but none of them say what temperature is ‘high enough’ or how long is ‘long enough’ - do you have any references for this information? Thank you!
 
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