IN LEHMANN'S TERMS
By Tom Lehmann

View Part 3 of the Dough Doctor’s how-to
dough making videos at www.pizzatv.com.

Question:
We are presently using deck ovens in our store but we are looking at air impingement ovens for a second store. I keep hearing conflicting reports about the air impingement ovens not being able to bake pizza with a crispy, hearth-baked characteristic. What’s the real story?

Answer:
A number of years ago a lot of effort on the part of the major air impingement oven companies went into developing baking profiles that would effectively simulate a hearth-baked characteristic. To a great extent these baking profiles were successful, but they never really fully captured all of the unique characteristics of a hearth-baked pizza. Recently, we have worked with Lloyd Pans (www.lloydpans.com) to develop a baking disk to impart these unique characteristics. So what we have now is a new, hearth bake disk which, when combined with a properly set-up air impingement oven, and a sugar free dough, gives a finished pizza with all of the desired hearth-baked characteristics – such as crispiness, light, bubbly raised edge, and moderately blistered bottom appearance, which also imparts a unique flavor to the crust that used to only come from hearth-baked pizzas. The answer to your question is yes, it is possible to get a true, hearth-baked characteristic on pizzas coming out of an air impingement oven.

Since different oven manufacturers, and even different ovens within a manufacturer’s product line will require different finger profiles for a hearth-baked characteristic, it is suggested that you contact your oven manufacturer to find out what finger configuration is recommended for your particular oven. Then, begin experimenting with baking temperatures in the range of 470 to 490˚F, with baking times in the range of 5 to 6 minutes. Experiment to determine which temperature and baking time gives you the best overall results. If you happen to have one of the new Lincoln FASTBAKE ovens, set the temperature at 485˚F and the baking time at 5 minutes and you’re good to go.

Question:
How do you make a good emergency dough?

Answer:
I’m really not sure that you can make a “good” emergency dough, but you can make an effective one that will allow you to keep your doors open when you might have had to otherwise close down due to the fact that you didn’t have any dough with which to work.

You might lose your dough due to any number of reasons, but the most common ones include loss of power during the night, resulting in your cooler warming up to the point where the dough began to actively ferment and grow right out of the dough boxes. In short, it “blew.” Another common reason to lose a dough is because of an ingredient scaling error such as: the yeast was not added, sugar or salt were not scaled, or the salt was scaled as the sugar (after all, they do look alike), and it was scaled again as the salt (trust the voice of experience, it can and does happen). Whatever the reason for dough failure, it is not pleasant to come into your store in the morning to discover that you don’t have any usable dough for the day. This is where an emergency dough comes into play. This is also not the time to be thinking about weighing up a dough that has radically different ingredients or ingredient amounts from your regular dough, so for the sake of simplicity, and comfort level, we want to keep the emergency dough as close to our regular dough as possible. The easiest way to accomplish this is to base our emergency dough on our regular dough formulation with only some minor changes to allow it to function as an emergency dough.

Here are the recommended changes needed to convert your regular pizza dough into an effective emergency dough:
Double the amount of yeast used in the dough.

Increase the temperature of the water used to make the dough by 15˚F. This should give you a dough that is close to the 90 to 95˚F temperature range than the commonly recommended 80 to 85˚F range. Even if your normal dough temperature is outside of this temperature range, the warmer water will result in a higher finished dough temperature, which is what we are looking for.

Mix the dough as you normally would.

Scale and ball the dough immediately after mixing, place into dough boxes or onto trays, cover, and allow to remain at room temperature for about 60 minutes, then check the dough to determine if it can be shaped by whatever procedure you use. If the dough isn’t ready, allow it to rest until it can be easily shaped into dough skins. From this time, you will only have about 90 minutes to use the dough. After that, it will become too gassy to use. You don’t have to toss the dough out though, you can shape the dough skins and place them on screens, disks, even cardboard pizza circles and store them in the cooler for use later in the day. Remember to keep an eye on your dough/skin inventory, as you will need to make more doughs during the day as needed. At the end of the day, discard any remaining emergency dough and prepare your regular dough for use on the following day(s).

Remember that emergency doughs generally exhibit a pronounced tendency to bubble during baking, so keep a bubble popper handy and keep an eye on the pizzas as they are baking.

I recommend that you convert a copy of your dough formula to an emergency dough and place it into a plastic sleeve in your office where you can get to it when needed. This will make things go a lot smoother when “that day” happens and your brains turn to mush as you try to sort things out. Just grab the emergency dough formula and begin scaling the ingredients without having to think about making changes. Follow the directions and you’re home free, or at least you will have dough to work with, which sure beats the alternative.

Question:
What causes our cheese to oil out so bad?

Answer:
Excessive oiling out of the cheese can be caused by a number of things including improper storage temperature or excessive storage time. For the most part, we don’t see excessive storage time as a problem, but occasionally, we see cheese being frozen. This can result in the cheese oiling out if the cheese was not originally designed to be frozen. Exposure to excessively high temperature can result in some cheeses oiling out. This can happen when the cheese is exposed to high temperature during baking. To determine if this is the cause of your problem, reduce your baking temperature to 500˚F to see if the oiling out problem ceases. The third cause has to do with the cheese itself. Some cheeses just naturally exhibit a tendency to oil out, regardless of what the baking temperature is. To determine if this is the cause of the problem you will need to obtain a similar cheese or cheese blend and compare its baking properties against your regular cheese. Keep in mind that American and cheddar cheese have a greater tendency to oil out on a pizza, and that the whole milk Mozzarellas and Provalones may also exhibit this characteristic, but also remember that the same cheese or cheese blend from a different manufacturer may perform entirely different on your pizzas.

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