What oil, sugar and yeast do in pizza dough (in varying amounts)
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That said, I know that if I put dough straight into the refrigerator as Ragusea does here it needs far more yeast to rise. I'm not surprised at his results. When I've used little yeast and skipped the room temperature rise I got hardly any rise. But a couple hours on the counter to rise and then some days in the fridge would have evened out the dough performance.
I'm sure that you could get no yeast to work in most places, but you'd just have to leave it out for a long time uncovered before baking, preferably with exposure to outdoor air, to have it colonized by wild yeasts. This is a traditional method of bread baking in many places. However, the results are relatively unpredictable.
With the initial rise at room temperature, I've never seen a reason to use more than a little pinch of active dry yeast. I just check on the bowl of dough every couple of hours and refrigerate it once it's doubled or tripled in size. I started doing this because a longer rise is associated with more flavor. More yeast would mean a faster rise, although if it goes straight into the refrigerator it would stay slow and I'm sure tastes great, perhaps better than what I do. But I'd be buying a lot more yeast. Yeast isn't expensive, but I like how a package of yeast lasts me years in the freezer. I'd change what I'm doing for better results. Perhaps I'll try a big spoonful of yeast and straight into the fridge. I always liked the purity of just a tiny bit of yeast, through. Not eating a lot of emulsifiers and whatever else is in the yeast pellets. Just a few tiny pellets, and the yeast from them multiplying in my dough (usually just flour, water, and salt.
What I'd read from more experienced bakers is that if you leave the the dough at room temperature to rise, a smaller amount of yeast just takes longer to get to the same place. My pizza doughs are multi-day projects, so I don't mind leaving the dough on the counter all day or overnight before refrigerating it for up to a week. I'll use the minimum amount of yeast I think I can get away with (assuming it could be that most pellets are no longer alive) if I'm leaving the dough out for a long time, such as overnight.
But if I was leaving for the weekend and had to out the dough straight into the fridge, I'd use a lot more yeast as Ragusea does. A small amount of yeast takes too long in the cold to multiply to the amount of yeast needed to rise and ferment. Using a lot of yeast as he does means the dough can start rising and fermenting significantly in the fridge.
Date: 2022-01-25
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Comments and reviews: 9
Bonzulac
Nothing is objectively good or bad. Good and bad are inherently subjective concepts; and if you ever hear someone saying something is objectively good or objectively bad, either they don't know what objectively means; they think that creating a list of subjective standards by which to judge something makes that judgement objective; or, worst of all, they think their opinions are not just personal tastes but inherent truths they have discovered woven into the fabric of reality and that anyone with a different opinion is objectively wrong. Let's not encourage dangerous bigots like this by saying that things are objectively bad or good, because that's just going to encourage them to think things like gay people shouldn't exist because they find them icky or whatever. There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. Hey, we don't just still read those plays because they're fancy. The guy knew what he was talking about.
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Nothing is objectively good or bad. Good and bad are inherently subjective concepts; and if you ever hear someone saying something is objectively good or objectively bad, either they don't know what objectively means; they think that creating a list of subjective standards by which to judge something makes that judgement objective; or, worst of all, they think their opinions are not just personal tastes but inherent truths they have discovered woven into the fabric of reality and that anyone with a different opinion is objectively wrong. Let's not encourage dangerous bigots like this by saying that things are objectively bad or good, because that's just going to encourage them to think things like gay people shouldn't exist because they find them icky or whatever. There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. Hey, we don't just still read those plays because they're fancy. The guy knew what he was talking about.
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Humble
You didn't state the recipes for each bread. And you didn't give a conclusion of which ones the best for taste, texture and flavour. In an experiment, there's a hypothesis, method used and a conclusion. Maybe have two categories: one for thin crust and the second for deep pan/thick crust. But please state which bread tasted the best along with the recipe.
Also please show us how to make a dominoes pizza.
Also you kept the flour, salt and hydration % constant. You needed to vary the hydration levels as well. Maybe starting at 50%, all the way to 80%. I think hydration % and fermentation time are just as important as the ingredients. I think in your next video you need to vary the hydration levels.
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You didn't state the recipes for each bread. And you didn't give a conclusion of which ones the best for taste, texture and flavour. In an experiment, there's a hypothesis, method used and a conclusion. Maybe have two categories: one for thin crust and the second for deep pan/thick crust. But please state which bread tasted the best along with the recipe.
Also please show us how to make a dominoes pizza.
Also you kept the flour, salt and hydration % constant. You needed to vary the hydration levels as well. Maybe starting at 50%, all the way to 80%. I think hydration % and fermentation time are just as important as the ingredients. I think in your next video you need to vary the hydration levels.
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Eva
Adam, it's time you find the courage to dive into experimenting with sourdough cultures/starters(again. It's fun, I know you'd love it!
You did that one video about a year ago, but I don't recall any followup. You already have a really solid baseline understanding of the science behind bread, it will be a fun challenge for you to play around with - Best of all is that it yields fantastic tasting breads of all kinds, flat or loaves. Sourdough pizza could be up next.
Get on it, you know you want to. You're partway there with the aged pizza doughs.
Regards Scandinavian foodie, that is way too into scratch cooking and baking.
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Adam, it's time you find the courage to dive into experimenting with sourdough cultures/starters(again. It's fun, I know you'd love it!
You did that one video about a year ago, but I don't recall any followup. You already have a really solid baseline understanding of the science behind bread, it will be a fun challenge for you to play around with - Best of all is that it yields fantastic tasting breads of all kinds, flat or loaves. Sourdough pizza could be up next.
Get on it, you know you want to. You're partway there with the aged pizza doughs.
Regards Scandinavian foodie, that is way too into scratch cooking and baking.
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Tom
As a professional brewer who deals with yeast a lot I love the continual exploration of pizza dough. After rewatching the videos on cold fermentation and autolysis It makes me wonder a few things:
1. How do yeast quantity and fermentation time relate to each other? For example, can one use more yeast and a shorter fermentation time and still get the complexity of a longer fermentation?
2. Would using different strains of brewers yeast (same genus and species as bakers yeast) affect the flavor as it does in beer?
In any case I'm definitely going to develop a thin and thick crust recipe using this information. Thanks!
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As a professional brewer who deals with yeast a lot I love the continual exploration of pizza dough. After rewatching the videos on cold fermentation and autolysis It makes me wonder a few things:
1. How do yeast quantity and fermentation time relate to each other? For example, can one use more yeast and a shorter fermentation time and still get the complexity of a longer fermentation?
2. Would using different strains of brewers yeast (same genus and species as bakers yeast) affect the flavor as it does in beer?
In any case I'm definitely going to develop a thin and thick crust recipe using this information. Thanks!
reply
Trevor
Hey, Pizza bread! I actually made that for lunch today, on a cast iron pan. Put it on the pan cold with plenty of oil, put it on the stovetop on medium until the bottom darkens to a level you like, then put in the oven for 7 minutes. Great if you don't have a pizza steel.
Bonus technique: divide into 4 portions, oil the top and bottom, then flatten, stretch, and fold them, like, 5 times. (After a while you will have trouble stretching the dough; that's when you should stop) You should end up with a flaky roll with a bunch of distinct layers, with very little prep or cooking time.
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Hey, Pizza bread! I actually made that for lunch today, on a cast iron pan. Put it on the pan cold with plenty of oil, put it on the stovetop on medium until the bottom darkens to a level you like, then put in the oven for 7 minutes. Great if you don't have a pizza steel.
Bonus technique: divide into 4 portions, oil the top and bottom, then flatten, stretch, and fold them, like, 5 times. (After a while you will have trouble stretching the dough; that's when you should stop) You should end up with a flaky roll with a bunch of distinct layers, with very little prep or cooking time.
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Benny
I saw that gummy layer a lot when trying to make Japanese cheesecake. It was very frustrating cause I kept thinking that water was getting in via the water bath but no, it kept appearing even when I was using a non-springform pan. To this day, I m still not certain why I kept getting that layer (intermittently. Perhaps I over beat the meringue? Also, maybe the nature of the recipe meant you couldn t get consistent results in a home kitchen? Cause sometimes it did turn out beautiful.
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I saw that gummy layer a lot when trying to make Japanese cheesecake. It was very frustrating cause I kept thinking that water was getting in via the water bath but no, it kept appearing even when I was using a non-springform pan. To this day, I m still not certain why I kept getting that layer (intermittently. Perhaps I over beat the meringue? Also, maybe the nature of the recipe meant you couldn t get consistent results in a home kitchen? Cause sometimes it did turn out beautiful.
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Luke
Also, without the baker's yeast there you create a nutrient broth for other stuff - fungi and bacteria - in the environment to more slowly ferment. That may be part of the bathwater taste. Having yeast in there tilts the micro-ecology waaaaaaaaay in favor of S. cerevisiae, which is able to grow and divide super rapidly and absolutely dominate that culture when added in those huge numbers at the very beginning.
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Also, without the baker's yeast there you create a nutrient broth for other stuff - fungi and bacteria - in the environment to more slowly ferment. That may be part of the bathwater taste. Having yeast in there tilts the micro-ecology waaaaaaaaay in favor of S. cerevisiae, which is able to grow and divide super rapidly and absolutely dominate that culture when added in those huge numbers at the very beginning.
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LambdaLambda
Great video, super informative and imediately useful. I wonder if the extra yeast would be equivalent to leaving it for longer in the fridge (and also if wxtra-yeasting a dough is a remedy for the tradicional illness of making dough planning for 7-day rise and eating it the next day, or if those two paths to extra-fermented goodness taste different. Also, gee, I wonder what anabelle will comment here.
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Great video, super informative and imediately useful. I wonder if the extra yeast would be equivalent to leaving it for longer in the fridge (and also if wxtra-yeasting a dough is a remedy for the tradicional illness of making dough planning for 7-day rise and eating it the next day, or if those two paths to extra-fermented goodness taste different. Also, gee, I wonder what anabelle will comment here.
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Ole-Jeger
If I had to critique one thing here its that you tried both halved and doubled amounts of the ingredients. I think for a more predictable experiment you should have tried +/- half instead. The benefit of this is that you then have a uniform linear relationship between your data points. This of course comes with its own challenges, but I think you could have worked around them.
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If I had to critique one thing here its that you tried both halved and doubled amounts of the ingredients. I think for a more predictable experiment you should have tried +/- half instead. The benefit of this is that you then have a uniform linear relationship between your data points. This of course comes with its own challenges, but I think you could have worked around them.
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