Dough for Desserts

Q: We want to make some type of apple dessert pizza. What can you suggest that is easy to make?

One of my all time favorites is a dessert pizza, and making them is almost as much fun as eating them. They are really very easy and they don’t require any special handling or preparation.

Use your regular dough skin as if you were going to make a regular pizza. Brush it lightly with melted butter, then sprinkle it with cinnamon and granulated sugar. Next, thinly slice a few Granny Smith apples (no need to peel them) and drop the slices into a bowl of water to which one ounce of lemon juice has been added for each quart of water. This will keep the apple slices from turning brown.

Remove apple slices from the water, as needed, and arrange them on the dough skin so that the ends of the apple slices are oriented towards the center and rim of the dough skin. I then hen apply cherry size dollops of ricotta cheese over the pizza, but this isn’t necessary if you are watching costs.

Top the pizza with a streusel topping made as follows: blend together one pound of sugar, one pound of butter, ¼ ounce of salt, ½ ounce of vanilla flavoring and 4 pounds of flour. Lightly mix until the mix takes on a crumbly consistency. Be careful so as not to over-mix into a paste. The streusel should freely crumble when rubbed between your hands.

Apply a moderate topping of streusel to the pizza and take directly to the oven for baking. These pizzas will bake at the same time and temperature as your regular pizzas in most cases. When the pizzas come out of the oven, set aside to cool for about 10 minutes, then ice with a simple powdered sugar/water icing.

Here’s a tip: When making the icing, use regular tap water, not hot water, and immediately transfer into squeeze type bottles (like you might use for mustard or other squeeze condiments). Then just squeeze the icing onto the pizza. The icing can be stored at room temperature for up to three days.

For a quick up-charge, reheat a slice of the dessert pizza before applying the icing and finish with a scoop of vanilla ice cream for dessert pizza ala mode. It is delicious and eye catching when your customers see it move through the dining room!

If you want to “up the ante” a little, try this for a dessert pizza: prepare the dough skin as described above, add the apple slices, then add halved red and green grapes, strawberry slices, a few blueberries, and maybe a few peach or mango slices for additional color.

Garnish with the streusel, bake and finish as described above. I like to keep my dessert pizza portions on the smaller size to control cost. I normally make them on a 12-inch format, slice into eight slices and sell by the slice. You can make these during slow times and hold them in the cooler for up to two days if desired. Warm, cold or a la mode, they are great tasting and carry their weight on your table tickets, too.

Q: What makes my dough so rubbery when I take it out of the mixer?

To answer your question in one word: gluten. It is what is responsible for the rubbery consistency of your dough, but I don’t think that’s the answer you’re looking for. If your dough feels unusually tough, or rubbery after mixing, the problem is usually due to under- absorption of the dough. To put it another way, you may not have added enough water to the dough. Even though it’s the same amount of water that you have always added, any one bag of flour may exhibit absorption properties outside of the normal bounds. Remember, flour is a very dynamic ingredient. It is constantly changing, and every shipment is somewhat different from the last shipment.

This is one time where the knee-jerk reaction is to add more water to the dough in an attempt to soften/loosen it up a little. And, indeed, that is the right thing to do in this particular circumstance.

If you are using 50 pounds of flour in each of your doughs, begin by increasing the amount of water in your dough by 1 pound, and then make further increases in 8-ounce increments until the dough feels like something closer to normal again. If the problem has started when you changed flour brands, it might be the result of using a flour with an excessively high protein level. Even though both brands may have indicated “high protein” or “high gluten,” that doesn’t mean that they’re the same. Far from it, in fact, as there is no standard for high protein or high gluten flour. I’ve personally seen bagged flour with the words “high gluten” on the bag that, when analyzed, only contained a little over 11 percent protein content. That is a far cry from the 13-plus percent protein content that we typically recognize as high protein flour.

Lastly, if your observations are that the flour is only occasionally tough and rubbery, seemingly with no rhyme or reason, check the actual weight of your bags of flour. We have seen 50-pound bags of flour vary in weight by 12, or more, ounces. This could possibly be the reason why you are occasionally seeing your doughs come out unusually tough and rubbery.

Good luck!

 

Tom Lehmann is a director at the American Institute of Baking in Manhattan, Kansas.

By Tom Lehmann

Q: In looking at different methods of dough management, some call for allowing the dough balls to rest at room temperature for an hour or more, while others say to take the dough directly to the cooler without any room temperature rest period. Does it really make a difference?

A: Yes, it does make a difference. When dough balls are allowed to rest at room temperature before going into the cooler they begin to ferment, becoming less dense. As a result, the dough becomes a better insulator, so when the dough goes into the cooler it is now more difficult to cool uniformly. In some cases, especially with larger/heavier weight dough balls, the dough may never cool down sufficiently to control the rate of fermentation so the dough “blows” in the cooler, resulting in a total loss.

Another problem with allowing the dough to rest at room temperature prior to going into the cooler has to do with the temperature of the dough as well as the actual time the dough is allowed to remain at room temperature. For example, if the dough is a couple degrees warmer than desired, or targeted, the dough will ferment more, making for an even less dense dough. If you forget to take the dough to the cooler at the prescribed time, this can also result in over fermentation. When combined with the perfect storm of a dough that is a little warmer than desired, and a warmer than usual shop temperature, the stage is set for blown dough as the order of the day.

By taking the dough directly from the mixer to the bench for scaling and balling, and then straight to the cooler, the effects of dough temperature (or more correctly stated, the effects of a missed target dough temperature) are minimized. And because we are doing everything right away, there is less chance to forget to take the dough to the cooler. Additionally, shop temperature will have essentially no impact upon the dough as the dough will not be exposed to it long enough to impact it. The net result of taking the dough directly to the cooler is that the dough will be denser, and have a more uniform density, making it easier to cool uniformly, and predictably, resulting in better handling dough, and improved dough performance over the refrigerated life of the dough.

As a side note, I’ve seen a number of cases where the operator thought he had the solution to his blown dough problem by simply reducing the yeast level in the dough to the point where the dough would no longer blow. This worked, but it created a whole new problem at the same time. With the lower yeast level, the dough would no longer rise as it used to, and the weight of the topping ingredients compressed the center of the pizza, reducing its ability to bake properly. The finished pizza was now characterized by a soft, soggy bottom crust, and worst of all, a gum line that just wouldn’t go away. As you can see, reducing the yeast level is not the best solution to this problem. The only real solution is to adjust/correct the dough temperature, rest time and possibly the room temperature, or simply take the dough directly to the cooler before any of these factors can impact the dough.



Q: What is the best way to thaw frozen dough that we are purchasing from our supplier?

A: If the manufacturer doesn’t provide instructions for slacking out/thawing their dough, remove the dough balls from the bulk package, and place onto a lightly oiled sheet pan or dough box. Oil the top of the dough balls and cover to prevent drying. If you only have a reach in cooler, oil the frozen dough ball and drop it into a plastic bread bag, then twist the open end closed and tuck it under the dough ball as you place it on a sheet pan or shelf in the cooler. Allow the dough balls to thaw overnight in the cooler and then remove a quantity of dough balls from the cooler and allow them to temper at room temperature for 90 to 120 minutes before starting to open them into pizza skins. Once you have allowed the dough balls to temper, they should be good to use for about a two-hour period of time. Any unused dough balls can be opened and placed onto screens or disks and stored in the cooler for use later in the day.

Q: How important is the temperature of the water that active dry yeast (ADY) is activated in?

A: Active dry yeast –— as well as instant dry yeast (IDY) —– are actually quite robust and will tolerate quite a bit of temperature abuse both in storage as well as during hydration. If you want to achieve optimum performance from the yeast as well as doughs that will handle and perform consistently, especially with extended periods of refrigerated storage, dry yeasts should be rehydrated, or added to the dough by the manner prescribed by the manufacturer.

For ADY, this means putting the yeast into a small quantity of warm (100F) water, and stirring it to suspend it in the water, then allowing it to hydrate for 10 minutes. In the case of IDY, it can be added directly to the dough, either by blending it into the dry flour, or by adding it to the dough after a minute of mixing. Just make sure the dough will be mixed for at least five additional minutes after the IDY has been added.

Tom Lehmann is a director at the American Institute of Baking in Manhattan, Kansas.

By Tom Lehmann

Question: Is there a good way to fix dough stickiness without drying it out?

A sticky dough can indeed create a sticky situation. There are a number of things that can cause the condition, therefore there are a number of solutions to the problems. Some of the more common reasons for sticky dough and the appropriate solutions are as follows:

Excessive Dough Absorption: This results in a decidedly wet, tacky feel. The only real corrective action is to reduce the amount of water added to the dough. I generally recommend making these corrections in increments of two percent (based on the weight of flour in the dough).

Under-mixed Dough: This has a sticky feel. Any dough that has not been mixed long enough to develop a smooth skin on it during the mixing stage will likely be somewhat sticky. Some people don’t find this to be a problem because they use a lot of dusting flour as a part of their crust’s signature.

Excessive Use of Malt: This can result in a sticky dough that just doesn’t seem to be corrected by any changes to the dough absorption or mixing time. The only corrective action is to reduce the amount of malt syrup added to the dough, or to change over to a non-diastatic (enzyme free) malt syrup. What is happening here is that the amylase enzyme in the malt syrup is breaking down part of the starch in the flour and converting it to fermentable sugars for metabolism by the yeast. Wen these starches are hydrolyzed, the water that they are holding is released into the dough and that, combined with the newly formed sugars, creates a decidedly sticky dough feel.

Every few years we hear about wheat that has sprouted while it is still in the field awaiting harvest. When the wheat sprouts, the enzymatic activity increases in a hurry, and when this wheat finds its way into your flour, it will result in a higher than normal enzyme activity in the flour. Here in the U.S. this is seldom a problem as the flour millers are diligent in keeping this from happening. But for readers in other countries, you may not be as fortunate. In this case, just be sure to put a light coating of oil on the dough before you remove it from the mixer. This should help to alleviate some of the stickiness.

Insufficient Salt Content: This creates dough stickiness that can easily be corrected by increasing the salt level to at least 1.75 percent of the weight of flour used in the formula.

Incorrect Hydration of Active Dry Yeast: When this is the case, some of the glutathione from the ADY is leached out. ADY should always be hydrated in warm water (105-110 F). If the ADY is hydrated in cold water, the glutathione that is leached out of the yeast can easily cause a soft, slightly sticky dough condition. In this case, it should also be noted that the dough performance will probably be less than ideal due to the impaired yeast condition. This can also happen with instant dry yeast that is hydrated in cold water.

In the end, if you find yourself in a sticky situation, just remember that application of oil to the dough is probably the single most effective action to take, regardless of the cause of the stickiness.

By Tom Lehmann

For some of us achieving a crispy crust pizza is like chasing down that legendary Golden Fleece, but it really doesn’t have to be such a massive undertaking. Below are some tips to get you on your way.

Tip No. 1: The protein content of the flour can influence the potential crispiness of the finished crust. We have found that flour with a protein content of at least 12 percent is necessary to achieve maximum crispiness. Since most “pizza flours” contain anywhere from 12 to 14 percent protein content, most of us should be okay in this regard. But if you happen to be using an all-purpose or H&R type flour, the lack of protein in the flour might be limiting the potential crispiness of your crust.

Tip No. 2: Fermentation has a great influence on crispiness due to the softening affect that it has on the dough. The softer, more relaxed, dough consistency allows for improved expansion properties of the dough during baking, resulting in a more open, porous internal structure within the crust. This open structure effectively inhibits heat transfer through the crust, allowing the surface of the crust to reach a higher temperature during baking, thus creating a crispier finished crust.

Tip No. 3: The amount of water added to the dough can have a significant effect on the crispiness of the finished crust, but not in the way as many of you may think. It’s actually the addition of more water to the dough that helps to create the conditions for a crispier finished crust. The water will make the dough somewhat softer, allowing it to more freely expand during those critical first few seconds of baking. This creates the desirable, open crumb structure that effectively blocks some of the heat transfer through the dough and allows for a better bottom bake (ultimately leading to a crispier finished crust).

Tip No. 4: Incorrect finished dough temperature can wreak havoc on your efforts. If the dough temperature is too high, we may find that the dough exhibits a pronounced tendency to “blow” during storage.

Tip No. 5: Incorrect dough management procedures can also effect crust crispiness for reasons similar to those cited in Tip No. 4 above. For example, if the dough is allowed to ferment at room temperature for any significant amount of time prior to taking it to the cooler after mixing, the dough will begin to ferment, making it less dense, more open and porous. In essence, the dough becomes more difficult to cool down in the cooler, leading to over-proofed dough balls in the box.

A similar problem can develop if we bypass the important cross-stacking step when putting the dough up in the cooler. The cross stacking of the dough boxes allows heat to freely escape from the dough, resulting in effective and consistent cooling of the dough. If the dough boxes are not cross-stacked, the heat is trapped within the dough boxes. Since yeast is a living organism, it produces heat (heat of metabolism) as it metabolizes nutrients and ferments. This too will result in dough balls that are either grown together, blown, or just wet and sticky on the following days.

Assuming we’re baking in the right type of oven, on the right type and color of pan or disk (if used), and the baking time and temperature are within reason, these tips might provide just the ticket to getting the crispy crust we’ve been looking for. You might note that many of the tips seem to have a common denominator — that is to allow the dough to rise slightly (oven spring) during the first few seconds of baking, which helps to establish an open, porous crumb structure within the dough/crust, thus preventing excessive heat transfer through the dough. This allows for more of the bottom bake to go into baking and drying the bottom of the dough, ultimately resulting in a crispier finished crust.

Don’t worry about the top of the pizza not getting sufficiently done when you block some of the heat from the bottom of the oven. The top heat of the oven will handle the top of the pizza just fine. But if you should find a problem, it is easily corrected by either increasing the oven temperature or extending the baking time slightly.

By Tom Lehmann

Did you ever feel like you were in a "tug of war" with your pizza dough? You form or stretch it out to 12 inches in diameter and before you can say “Mozzarella cheese”, then it magically assumes the rather unwanted shape of a 10-inch pizza skin. Now you enter into the game of stretching it out only to have it snap back again. Don't go looking for another dough forming method just yet, for all is not lost. What you are experiencing is just a common case of snap-back, otherwise known as “dough memory.”
Excessive dough memory can result from a number of things. The most common cause is excessive flour strength for the dough management procedure. It’s true that historically high protein flour was the order of the day for making pizza. But with the dough management procedures that we use today offering excellent control over dough fermentation and allowing us to hold the dough for three days or more under proper refrigeration, those super high-protein flours are all but a thing of the past. Instead, we opt for flour types with protein levels of 12.2 to 13.5 percent. But every once in a while someone starts out using a super high-protein flour with a refrigerated dough management procedure and ends up complaining about excessive snap-back, or they might take it upon themselves to formulate their dough with too much salt. In this case, the excessive salt level can and will impede fermentation to the point where the dough is not properly fermented to fully mellow or condition the gluten for shaping into pizza skins. Along these same lines, anything that might slow down the yeast activity or fermentation rate of the dough can have a similar effect. Some of these things are: mixing the salt, sugar and yeast together in the dough water (not recommended); hydrating active dry yeast in water that is either too warm or too cold; finished dough with a temperature that is too low (cold), or just plain insufficient yeast level.


So now that we know what causes the problem, how do we go about correcting it? The obvious solutions are to use a lower protein content flour, something more like a common bread flour rather than a pizza flour will do wonders for both correcting snap-back and reducing the dough cost. Using the correct amount of yeast and using it properly is important, as is monitoring and controlling the finished dough temperature to keep it between 80 to 85 F.
But what if none of these actions work for you, or for whatever reason they can't be implemented? This is where we consider “additive ingredients.” These are highly specialized ingredients designed to address very specific problems. Here, we want to use what are commonly called “dough relaxers.” These are ingredients that function by modifying the flour protein to weaken the protein or to give it a more relaxed or stretchable characteristic. These include L-Cysteine Hydrochloride, glutathione, protease enzymes, and –– more familiar –– garlic and onion powder.
Although L-Cysteine and glutathione may sound intimidating, these are quite natural, being nothing more than amino acids (also known as protein building blocks). Think of them as ingredients making up a protein. Then there is the protease enzyme, a natural enzyme present with the yeast. It works by breaking down, or hydrolyzing, proteins to give the dough a more relaxed characteristic. Many people don't realize that both onion and garlic are also effective reducing agents in yeast-leavened doughs. By just adding some onion and/or garlic powder to the dough you can effectively reduce some of the undesirable memory characteristics of a dough. If the problem is really troublesome, you might need to bring out the "big guns" in the form of L-Cysteine or Glutathione.
These materials are so potent that the amounts used are only measured in parts per million parts of flour weight (one part per million, "ppm", is equal to one pound per one million pounds of flour), and they are fully capable of liquefying a dough if used at excessive levels. To facilitate the use of L-Cysteine, it is typically blended into a carrier such as whey, flour or starch, so it is in a highly diluted concentration that makes scaling of the ingredient much easier and a lot more accurate. Commercial products using L-Cysteine are readily available with PZ-44 being well-recognized in the pizza industry. Glutathione is very similar to L-Cysteine in both function and use levels. It is derived from yeast. As such, "dead yeast," as it is commonly called, is a common dough relaxer used in the pizza industry.
Protease enzymes are also very effective dough relaxers and also have the ability to completely liquefy a dough like L-Cysteine and Glutathione, but they are unique in their function in that they actually hydrolyze or destroy the protein rather than just modify it to achieve a relaxed dough condition. Protease enzymes also continue working in the dough all the way up until the time that the dough is baked in the oven, and the rate of reaction can be influenced by the temperature of the dough at the time of mixing. These characteristics tend to make protease enzymes difficult to control in most aspects of retail pizza production, hence they are seldom used except for rare cases where they might be included as part of an "additive ingredient package".
Onion and garlic (normally used as a powder) are effective dough relaxers that work in a manner similar to that of L-Cysteine and Glutathione but they have a limited reducing affect making it almost impossible to overdose or liquefy a dough. These ingredients can be added in the form of your regular onion or garlic powder, or if you don't want to have the accompanying characteristic flavor and aroma you can purchase a deodorized form.
Snap-back or excessive dough memory need not be a problem or source of aggravation once you understand what causes it and what steps can be taken to control it. Hopefully, this article has given some insight into the causes and measures that can be taken to correct this common problem.

By Tom Lehmann

Have you ever had one of those nights where a storm kept you awake? Then, after getting a few hours of sleep you go to your store to open and find that your dough has blown courtesy of a power outage. It’s a nightmare come true, and panicking is usually the first reaction. But you can tell customers you’re closed (at least you shouldn’t) when lunchtime rolls around, because that doesn’t pay the bills.

So, what do you do? You enter the world of emergency dough.
Every shop should have an emergency dough formula and procedure tucked away for these not-so-special moments. I like to make my emergency dough from my regular dough formula because I’m already familiar with it. Still, we need to make a few changes to our dough formula to allow it to be made quickly and be ready for making pizza skins in not much more than two hours.

I have found that increasing the yeast content to double the normal level helps to speed things up a bit. Increasing the finished dough temperature to something in the 90 to 95 F range really helps to get the dough on line within the two-hour time limit as well. The quickest way to do this is to just increase the temperature of the water that you are adding to the dough by 15 F (assuming you are presently targeting a finished dough temperature of 80 to 85 F). If you are not targeting your finished dough temperature in that range, give it your best estimation for water temperature to get your dough to come from the mixer within 90 to 95 F.

I also like to have a bag of reducing agent, such as PZ-44, on hand for these occasions. By including a reducing agent in the emergency dough formulation you will have a greater assurance that the dough will handle well without excessive snap-back during the forming procedure.

Lastly, adding a small amount of regular household vinegar (white vinegar/50 grain strength) will help to restore at least some of the flavor to the finished crust that you are going to lose due to the lack of fermentation. When adding vinegar, add it at one percent of the flour weight and reduce the water weight by the same amount. This will help to keep your dough formula in proper balance.
When mixing an emergency dough, keep in mind that the total mixing time will be about 75 percent of the mixing time used for your regular dough. This means if you normally mix your dough for 12 minutes, you will be looking at a total mixing time of about 9 minutes for your emergency dough.

Immediately after mixing, scale the dough into desired weight pieces and form into balls. Wipe the dough balls with salad oil and place into dough boxes or your regular dough containers. Cover the dough containers to prevent drying and allow the dough to remain at room temperature for approximately two hours before you use it. Once you begin using the dough it will remain good to use for approximately 90 minutes.

After that it will become too gassy to continue using and will need to be discarded.
One trick I use with an emergency dough is to watch the way it handles. As soon as I think it is approaching the end of its life, I will shift into high gear and begin forming dough skins that I can put onto screens and place on a wire rack in the cooler. By doing this I don’t need to discard as much of the dough, and I'm building an inventory of dough skins that will be ready to use with a minimum of preparation when I get slammed later in the day. When using these refrigerated dough skins, be sure to pull them from the cooler about 20 minutes before you anticipate needing them. This will allow them to warm slightly, which makes for a better overall bake with less bubbling. While we’re on the topic of bubbling, be sure to dock all of the emergency dough skins just before dressing them to help control bubbling.

You will need to make additional emergency doughs during the day until you can get back into your regular dough again (which will probably be on the following day). When you are making emergency dough during the day, you will probably find that you need to make a batch every 75 to 90 minutes to provide a continual supply of fresh dough. If you are like most shops and experience a slow period during the afternoon, you will probably be able to get away with using your refrigerated dough skins during this time, but you will need to gear back up for the busy evening hours.

Also, when making your emergency dough keep in mind that you can, and should, add back as much of your unused scrap dough as possible. Even if the dough is gassy, you can add it back to your new dough without any problems. Just don't overload the capacity of your mixer when doing so.
Emergency dough is like an insurance policy. You hope you will never need to use it, but when the time comes, you're mighty glad you've got it to fall back on.

By Tom Lehmann

Gummy pizzas can be caused by a number of things. One, the pizza may not be thoroughly baked. If the oven temperature is too high, the outer portion of the crust can be nice and brown, but the center has not been fully baked. In these cases, the crust is generally said to be more "doughy" than just gummy. This characteristic is also accompanied by a strong “yeasty” taste and aroma in the baked crust.

A second cause might be due to the soaking of moisture from the sauce into the dough before baking. This can result from a pre-sauced pizza. What happens is that the water is absorbed into the dough immediately beneath the sauce, creating a sticky, gummy layer. With the addition of the cheese and other toppings, it is all but impossible to bake out this portion of the crust, which results in the classic "gum line" often reported just beneath the sauce layer.

A third cause might be due to the release of water from the vegetable toppings. This usually happens as the pizza is being baked. The underlying cause can be due to an excessive amount of vegetable topping, or possibly, the use of improperly frozen vegetable toppings. In either case, the toppings can release a significant amount of water during baking.

The solution here is to reduce the quantity of vegetable topping used, and to make sure any frozen toppings haven't been subjected to thaw conditions prior to application to the pizza. In some cases, the use of impingement baking can help to alleviate the problem, too. The highly focused/directed air of the impingement oven can increase the evaporative loss of the water as it is released from the toppings, so less of it finds its way to the crust.

Finally, there are some specialized ingredients available designed to help absorb the water as it’s released from the toppings, thus preventing its being absorbed into the crust.

By Tom Lehmann

Our pizza crust doesn't seem to have much flavor. What can we do to improve the flavor of our crust?

If you are allowing your dough to ferment overnight in the cooler, or several hours at room temperature, in all probability your dough has enough fermentation to achieve a good fermentation flavor, so we need to look elsewhere for a solution. Two of the most common reasons for insufficient flavor in pizza crust are due to a lack of either oil or salt in the formulation. This is especially so in formulas that are given in volumetric measures. The reason for this, I believe, is due to the fact that it is hard to determine if the amount of salt or oil added to a formula is when you're mentally wrestling with cups and tablespoon measures for a given quantity of flour. When a formula is given in weight measures, I think that it is easier to determine if the amount is within accepted limits.

Think of it like this: the salt generally will be within the range of 1.5 to two percent of the flour weight, and the oil should be one percent or more. It doesn't make any difference what the flour weight is, the percent amounts are always the same.

When a dough formula is lacking in salt, the flavor of the finished crust will be bland, and it might even take on something of a starchy taste. You might be really surprised to see how much a simple adjustment in the salt level can improve the crust flavor when the amount was originally too low.

The oil content of the dough can also have an impact upon the flavor of the crust. This is due to the fact that the oil can entrap many of the flavors of the baking pizza and bring them to the table of the consumer. While not as significant as the affect of salt, oil can and does impact the overall flavor profile of a pizza. All you really need to have in your formula is one percent oil to accomplish this. If you have more oil than this, so much the better, as you will also improve mouth feel, appearance, and maybe even contribute some of the oil's flavor to the crust.

By Tom Lehmann

Question: We bake our pizzas at 600 F and they are crispy when they first come out of the oven, but they soon turn soft and chewy. What can we do to keep our pizzas crispy longer

Answer: Three things come to mind that might be causing your problem. The first is the use of sugar or some other browning agent in the dough, such as milk or eggs. When any of these materials are added to a dough that will be baked at high temperature, you get premature browning of the crust. You could bake it longer, but the color would be excessively dark, and that wouldn’t be acceptable from an appearance standpoint. If you wanted to retain the formula, without removing the sugar, eggs or milk, you would have to reduce the oven temperature to allow for a longer baking time, which would provide for a crispier crust that would better retain its crispy characteristic.

The second problem could be the baking temperature. Even if your dough formula doesn’t contain any of the aforementioned browning agents, baking at an excessively high temperature can result in a very thin layer of crispiness on the bottom of the crust. As soon as the pizza comes out of the oven moisture begins to migrate from the moist interior of the crust to the dry, crispy portion, thus causing it to become less crispy and more chewy.

The third problem could be the flour used in the dough. It is well recognized that the higher the protein content of the flour, the greater the potential for crispiness — but this comes at a price, because it also provides for a greater potential for chewiness, too. So, in this case, if the finished crust has sufficient crispiness, but is just too tough or chewy, the selection of a slightly lower protein flour might be just the ticket to providing the less chewy crust characteristic. When making a change in protein content it’s a good idea to make a one-percent change in protein content whenever possible. This should provide sufficient change for you to assess the affect.

So, how do you know what flour to choose for the one-percent change in protein content? Your best bet is to contact the flour manufacturer/flour miller and ask to speak to someone in their flour technical services division. Tell them what the bag name of the flour you are presently using is and ask them for their recommendation.

By Big Dave Ostrander

Question: Is there a good way to fix dough stickiness without drying it out?

A sticky dough can indeed create a sticky situation. There are a number of things that can cause the condition, therefore there are a number of solutions to the problems. Some of the more common reasons for sticky dough and the appropriate solutions are as follows:

Excessive Dough Absorption: This results in a decidedly wet, tacky feel. The only real corrective action is to reduce the amount of water added to the dough. I generally recommend making these corrections in increments of two percent (based on the weight of flour in the dough).

Under-mixed Dough: This has a sticky feel. Any dough that has not been mixed long enough to develop a smooth skin on it during the mixing stage will likely be somewhat sticky. Some people don’t find this to be a problem because they use a lot of dusting flour as a part of their crust’s signature.

Excessive Use of Malt: This can result in a sticky dough that just doesn’t seem to be corrected by any changes to the dough absorption or mixing time. The only corrective action is to reduce the amount of malt syrup added to the dough, or to change over to a non-diastatic (enzyme free) malt syrup. What is happening here is that the amylase enzyme in the malt syrup is breaking down part of the starch in the flour and converting it to fermentable sugars for metabolism by the yeast. Wen these starches are hydrolyzed, the water that they are holding is released into the dough and that, combined with the newly formed sugars, creates a decidedly sticky dough feel.

Every few years we hear about wheat that has sprouted while it is still in the field awaiting harvest. When the wheat sprouts, the enzymatic activity increases in a hurry, and when this wheat finds its way into your flour, it will result in a higher than normal enzyme activity in the flour. Here in the U.S. this is seldom a problem as the flour millers are diligent in keeping this from happening. But for readers in other countries, you may not be as fortunate. In this case, just be sure to put a light coating of oil on the dough before you remove it from the mixer. This should help to alleviate some of the stickiness.

Insufficient Salt Content: This creates dough stickiness that can easily be corrected by increasing the salt level to at least 1.75 percent of the weight of flour used in the formula.

Incorrect Hydration of Active Dry Yeast: When this is the case, some of the glutathione from the ADY is leached out. ADY should always be hydrated in warm water (105-110 F). If the ADY is hydrated in cold water, the glutathione that is leached out of the yeast can easily cause a soft, slightly sticky dough condition. In this case, it should also be noted that the dough performance will probably be less than ideal due to the impaired yeast condition. This can also happen with instant dry yeast that is hydrated in cold water.

By Tom Lehmann

There are a number of things that can cause a pizza crust to become excessively tough or chewy. The tough and chewy stage is set when a high protein (very strong) flour is used to make the dough. Pizza crusts made with a high-protein flour of 13 percent or more can have a wonderfully light and crispy eating characteristic when the pizza is fresh and hot out of the oven, but upon standing for much more than 10 minutes it can become tough. This can happen on a buffet serving line, or in a box and/or insulated bag while the pizza is being transported to a customer’s home. The development of toughness is a result of moisture migration from the hot, moist toppings into the dry, crispy crust portion of the pizza. This is the reason we have those neat “ripple sheets” that you can set the pizza on in the box. The idea here is to hold the pizza off of the bottom of the box, thus allowing channels for the moisture to escape from the bottom of the pizza. We have found over the years that pizzas made from a slightly lower protein flour (in the 12 percent protein content range works will be just as crispy as pizzas made with a higher protein flour, but they will not become as tough and chewy over time.

Another cause of a tough and chewy crust is the development of a gum line in the pizza. The pizza can be baked so it looks great, and it will even have a good crisp to it, but when you take a close look at the inside of the pizza you might see a gray line just below the sauce. This is a gum line. The gum line represents a portion of the crust that has not been fully baked. As a result it has a greater moisture content than the rest of the crumb portion of the crust. After baking, moisture quickly moves out of this gum line and into the lower moisture areas (think crispy areas) where it does its dastardly deed of creating toughness and chewiness. If this is the cause of your problem, you will need to take steps to correct the gum line. This can include baking a little longer at a slightly lower oven temperature, not pre-saucing the dough skins, not thinning the sauce quite so much (try to get your sauce to about 12 to 13 percent solids), or you might be able to correct things by just applying a very thin coating of oil to the surface of the dough skin before saucing it.

We use fresh, compressed yeast. Does it make any difference how we add the yeast to the dough?

Yes, it does. A common way to incorporate the yeast into pizza dough is to add it into the water containing the salt and sugar. This is not a recommended practice as it can lead to damaged yeast, resulting in inconsistent yeast performance. This happens as a result of the potentially higher osmotic pressure of the salt/sugar solution. What this means is that the salt and sugar, under certain circumstances, could pull moisture — including essential enzymes and amino acids — out of the live yeast calls. This can lead to soft dough conditions, as well as less-than-ideal fermentation characteristics. To avoid this, we simply recommend that the salt and sugar never be allowed to come into direct contact with each other, even when in a solution. This is recommended for all kinds of yeast, not just compressed yeast.

We see that a good number of operators are in the habit of putting the yeast into the water and stirring it until the yeast is “dissolved.” But, frankly, I’ve got better things to do with my time, so we can dispense with stirring the yeast in the water. Just crumble it a little and add it right on top of the flour and it will get mixed into the dough just fine. I promise.
With all of this said, there is one small exception that you do need to be aware of. When using a vertical cutter mixer (VCM), the dough mixing times are so short that it can be difficult to get the yeast thoroughly dispersed throughout the dough without a little help. This help comes in the form of adding the yeast as a suspension. Put the yeast into a bowl containing a portion of the dough water, then add the yeast. Next, use a hand whisk to stir the yeast until it is completely suspended, then add it right on top of the flour in the mixing bowl. This won’t be a problem if you happen to use active dry yeast (ADY) since it must be pre-hydrated in a small portion of warm water anyways. But if you are using instant dry yeast (IDY) you are going to have to pre-hydrate this one too. Do this by putting the IDY into about five times its weight of 95F water and stir using a wire whisk until the yeast is fully hydrated and suspended in the water, then pour it onto the flour in the mixing bowl. Be sure to reduce the amount of water added to the bowl by the same amount of 95F water used to hydrate the yeast so that your dough formula remains in balance.