pizza notes

I've been a little preoccupied with Harvest's Pizza lately.  It's wonderful.  Tender, very lightly topped, crust as good as the toppings.  On occasion I can hit something close in my grill, but in the oven, most of my pies suck.  I latched onto thickness of dough over the past year or so.  I thought tenderness might derive from a super thin crust, but some observations the other night at Harvest led me to different thinking.  I realize a home oven isn't a real pizza oven, so my expectations are reasonable, but I should be able to do much better than I've been.

Thickness.  One can never measure dough thickness when it's less than an inch or so.  It's too irregular a surface to measure a cross section, one can only have a derived thickness by indicating the amount of dough per pie.  The other night at Harvest, me and my 3" x 5" recipe card coupled with our server kindly answering how much dough they use per pie gave the following: They use 270 g dough per 12" diameter pie, roughly 2.4 g / square inch of pizza.  I also noticed their toppings don't go anywhere close to the edge, presumably this is for crust people but more importantly, this undoubtedly keeps their oven from getting food on it and smoking.

This in mind, the next significant part is the dough.  The most likely candidate in my mind is fat content.  So, today I wanted to try a dough I've been fooling around with: a high fat dough from water 100 g, unbleached white 200 g, olive oil 40 g, salt 5 g, sugar 5 g and Fleischmann's instant active yeast, ca 2 g, allowed to sit in the fridge a day.

For kicks, I decided to try Lucky's dough.  They sell a bag for $3.  It's about 600 g, one of their pizza people says it's the amount they use for a 16" diameter pie (3 grams / square inch).  From the feel of their dough (the extensibility and snap back) and the label order of ingredients, my estimation is it's 70% hydration and a small bit of oil, ca. 5 grams and a trace of sugar.  By comparison to my high fat dough, it's much more slack and much leaner.  

For the comparison, I used 150 g dough per 8" diameter pie, topped with a light tomato sauce and some shredded mozz (cheap stuff) to view the puff on the dough.  I baked these directly on a cast iron sheet (half way position in the oven, preheated), 450F convection, 6 minutes each.

 Left is Lucky's Market and right is my high fat dough. Click to enlarge.

Crust profiles, the lean dough wins! Airy and more crisp.  The high fat one tasted terrible. Click on image to enlarge.

So I veered all over the place, that's what I meant by "notes" in the title.  Not a great comparison.  Lucky's made one dough, I made the other, undoubtedly different flour, not only higher fat in one, but hydration different, etc.  It was just an itch I needed to scratch. My goal is something as tender as Harvest, cooked in a regular oven,

Future runs:

-sticking with 2.5 - 3 grams / square inch

-leaner crust

-longer rest prior to baking

-my own version of Lucky's dough, e.g., water 210 g, flour 300 g, olive oil, 5-10 g, sugar 5 g, salt 5 g, yeast.  

-keep you all posted