making Dough!

[system]

After 20 years in the photo business, digital is about to run me out! I am reverting back to the first business I owned out of High school a sub shop.
Back then I lived in a large metro area and was able to purchase bread from a local bakery. I am now in a rural area and find myself having to bake my own due to lack of providers. I will also be making personal pan pizzas 8". From what I have been able to gleam from info on this site posted by others I have a general idea of what I need. The question I have concerns workflow and quantaties concerning mixing and holding dough. I hopefully anticipate selling about 200 subs per day . lets use 12’ as a standard, and maybe 75 to 100 personal 8" pizzas. Based on this volume here are my questions.

1)Can dough be mixed for 3 to 4 days volume in advance and held in refrigeration.

1. pros and cons(product quality) of mixing daily vs. mixing twice a week.
2. what size mixer would be the most effective for this volume?

Thanks any help would be greatly appreciated.
Elias

 

[system]

how rural an area are you in, though? Your sales estimates sound great for a new sub/urban location, but if your town is small with a couple of fastfood joints already…you’ll have work cut out to make that.

The dough gurus say you should make up dough balls, freeze 'em for a day or so, making sure they’re stacked with the first part of the roll facing east until the dark of the moon then the last roll should face south until the equinox then they should be upside down. Or something like that.

What’s better sounding to a customer? “We make our dough fresh daily” or “we make our dough a couple times a week at the most” Which would YOU buy?

Will you make your sandwich bread daily, or twice a week? THink Subway—what is one big attraction there? The smell of baking bread.

Treat all your dough products the same way. Equal rights for pizzas!

good luck getting back into food!

 

[system]

we are in a town pop 35k, but it is a hub city that the pop swells to about 50K on weekends.

Subway only bakes daily, there dough is frozen and shipped in. My preffered idea is two mix twice a week, store dough and bake daily.

If I were making dough daily, what kind of time are we looking at to make and prepare each day?

Eli the photoguy

 

[Tom_Lehmann]

Eli;
You should be able to make dough twice a week without any problem. Take a look in the RECIPE BANK for one of my dough formulas that has a dough management procedure attached to it. In my experience you can hold the dough for up to three days without any significant loss in overall finished crust quality. This means that you could mix your doughs on Sunday and use it through Wednesday, then mix another dough on Wednesday night and use it through Saturday. OK, not quite seven days. You can still hold the dough that you made on Wednesday in the cooler and safely use it on Sunday but you will most likely be at the very end of the life of the dough so just be careful on how you handle the dough on that fourth day. 1) Don’t allow the dough to warm at room temperature for more than an hour before using it. 2) Don’t allow the dough to remain at room temperature for more than 2 hours once you begin using it. 3) If you have any dough that will not be used within this recommended time frame open it up into dough skins and place on individual pizza screens and take to the cooler for rapid chilling. Once cooled (about 45 minutes) you can stack the dough skins on a cardboard circle with a piece of parchment paper between each skin, cover with a piece of plastic to prevent drying and keep in the cooler. They will last for the entire day. Any dough balls or formed skins left at the end of the day (fourth day) can be incorporated back into your new dough that you will be making. Try to limit the amount of old dough added to the new dough to not more than 20% of the weight of the new dough. As for a mixer, I would be looking at either a heavy duty 60 or 80 quart size mixer. We don’t recommend freezing the dough unless it is absolutely necessary to hold the dough for more than 4 days.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor