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Click here to watch dough making videos by Tom Lehmann
In looking at your dough recipes in the RECIPE BANK I find that they are all given in percents. How do I change these to a dough using 40 pounds of flour?
Answer:
This is a commonly asked question so I never mind explaining it again.
The percentages are known as baker's percents. By this method of showing a formula all ingredients are expressed as a percentage of the weight of wheat flour used in the dough formula, with the flour always expressed as 100%. The main advantage to showing a formula in baker's percent is that the dough size can be very easily adjusted to utilize any amount of flour desired. Additionally, this method of showing or expressing a formula allows one to easily look at a formula and determine if it is in correct balance or not. This is something that cannot be done with a dough recipe given in volumetric measures (cups, teaspoons, tablespoons, etc.).
To change from percentages to weights all you need is a calculator with a "%" key function and a couple minutes time. Here is a working example of how it's done:
Formula:
Flour 100%
Salt 1.75%
Sugar 1.5%
Olive oil 2%
Instant dry yeast 0.375%
Water 57%
In this case we will convert this formula to a dough formula that is based on 40-pounds of flour weight.
Ladies and gentlemen, power up your calculators. Here we go:
Flour: 40-pounds (because that's how much you decided you wanted to use) it could be any amount. The only thing to keep in mind about the flour weight is in how you express the flour weight. If you express the flour weight in pounds, all of the ingredient weights will also be given in whole or decimal parts of a pound. If you express it in ounces, all of the ingredient weights will be given in ounces. The same is true for metrics where kilograms or grams would be used. But with metrics, since kilograms and grams are proportional you can just show the flour weight in kilograms and any decimal fraction of a kilogram can be read directly as grams. Metrics are just so much easier and more convenient than pounds and ounces, but that another story.
Enter the calculations into your calculator as follows:
Salt: 40 X 1.75 (press the % key) and read 0.7-pounds in the display window. To convert this to ounces: 0.7 X 16 = 11.2 ounces (call it 11.25 -ounces).
Sugar: 40 X 1.5 (press the % key) and read 0.6-pounds in the display. Convert to ounces: 0.6 X 16 = 9.6-ounces (call it 9.5-ounces)
Olive oil: 40 X 2 (press the % key) and read 0.8-pounds in the display. Convert to ounces: 0.8 X 16 = 12.8-ounces (call it 12.75-ounces).
Instant dry yeast: 40 X 0.375 (press the % key) and read 0.15-pounds in the display. Convert to ounces: 0.15 X 16 = 2.4-ounces (call it 2.5-ounces).
Water: 40 X 57 (press the % key) and read 22.8-pounds in the display. This is equal to 22-pounds plus 0.8-pounds. To convert 0.8-pounds to ounces: 0.8 X 16 = 12.8-ounces (call it 12.75-ounces) the full amount of water to add is 22-pounds and 12.75-ounces.
To make a different size dough, just plug in a different flour weight. The math will be exactly the same, and because this is all done mathematically, there are no other adjustments needed to the amounts of any ingredients when increasing or decreasing the batch size.
I see both wood and metal peels being sold. Are there any advantages of one over the other?
Answer:
The metal peels are a whole lot better when used as an oven peel than as a prep peel. Their lighter weight makes them a lot handier and easier to use in the tight confines of most deck ovens when moving, spinning, or removing pizzas. They also have a thinner leading edge which makes it easier to slip the peel under the edge of the pizza be it on the deck or on a screen, disk or in a pan. The wood peels are great when used as a prep peel. Dust the peel with a little corn meal, semolina flour, wheat bran, or any combination of the above as both a release agent and as a slip agent to allow the fully dressed pizza to slide from the peel without leaving the dough skin behind. The wood peels are not subject to the same rapid temperature change as are the metal peels. This means that there is a reduced risk of the dough skin sticking to the peel due to moisture condensation or build up on the peel. When this happens you either peel just the toppings into the oven and the dough skin remains firmly attached to the peel, or if you are lucky, your pizza is just misshapen as it is peeled into the oven, and as luck would have it, this is most likely to happen at your busiest time when you might pre-prep a few skins with just sauce and cheese on a couple of extra peels to help ease through the rush period. This brings me to one last thing about prep peels. Some are made from glued pieces of wood and some are made from laminated pieces of wood, and still others are made from some type of composite material that looks something like Masonite/tempered hardboard. All of these share one thing in common, if you leave a fully dressed dough skin on the peel for much more than just a couple of minutes, regardless of what you are using as a slip agent, or how much of you have on the peel (within reason) the dough will soon begin to exhibit a tendency to stick to the peel. Gently shaking the peel helps to keep things from sticking for a short time, but the real solution is to keep the time that the dressed skin(s) remain on a peel as short as possible. An ounce of prevention goes a long way when dealing with prep peels and dressed pizza skins because once that skin decides to stick to the peel the real fun begins in trying to figure out how to get it off without destroying an unbaked pizza in the process.