MWTC,
I have conducted some limited tests to see if I could “kill” a dough that was made using a natural starter/preferment. It is possible. If you let the dough ferment too long, it will die. What usually happens is that the dough runs out of natural sugars to continue to feed the yeast, the enzymes (mainly protease) attack the gluten structure and weaken it, and water is released, making the dough wet/moist and clammy. If you catch the dough in time before it has expired, you may be able to make a pizza out of it, but the crust is likely to be more like a cracker with mediocre oven spring and lack crust color (because there is insufficient residual sugar at the time of baking to promote browning). If you don’t catch the dough in time, you are likely to find that you can’t even shape the dough into a skin without the skin tearing. If you try to add more flour to compensate for the wetness, that will usually not work. If you manage somehow to shape and dress the skin to make your pizza, it will be a failure. For all intents and purposes, the dough is dead, and you will have wasted the sauce, cheese and toppings.
In your case, I think what happened is that you let the dough ferment too long before refrigerating it. If your starter culture was at peak activity, 15 hours at room temperature was most likely too long. I don’t know the intimate details of your starter, but I think that 6-8 hours at room temperature would have been more appropriate before refrigerating. A combination of 15 hours at room temperature and another day in the refrigerator, plus another 2-3 hours at room temperature, quite likely pushed your dough over the edge, or maybe just short of it. Refrigeration slows down the relevant processes involving yeast, enzymes and bacteria, but they don’t completely stop. An alternative would have been to refrigerate the dough after making it, or within a few hours later, if you were trying to manage the dough to suit your schedule. You would have then made up for the reduced rate of fermentation by allowing the dough to warm up at room temperature for several hours before using.
In short, I think you pushed your dough to the limit or just short of it. But, I think and hope that you learned something from the exercise. It’s a humbling experience but an important one as part of your pizza education when using natural starters/preferments. I often remind people that once the dough has been made and been “programmed” by what you did to make it, it controls you, not the other way around. With natural starters, this is even more so the case.
