Are you trying to get more oven spring out of your pizza dough and getting a little frustrated?
There are commercial products that promote increased oven spring (a.k.a. oven rise), but they’re typically for white pan bread. These additives typically boost volume through increased oven spring by about 10% to 15%. If you’re working with a pan bread, which has a height of 100 millimeters, or about 4”, or more, that’s great. It might give you a volume/height increase to the order of 10 to 15 millimeters or about 5/8”. But a pizza crust has a height of about 6 millimeters, or ¼”, for a thin crust and 24 millimeters (about 1”) for a thick crust. That means you’d only get a height increase of between 0.9 millimeters (about 1/24”) to 3.6 millimeters (about 1/8”).
In other words, additives probably won’t do the trick. So how do we go about increasing oven spring? Fortunately, there’s another solution. You’ll want to make your dough softer, more extensible and easier to expand during those first few critical seconds in the oven, because that’s when the majority of the oven spring occurs.
Let’s look at a few options that can help increase oven spring in pizza crust production. They include:
- Increasing the baking temperature.
- Optimizing dough absorption for maximum oven spring. (Many doughs can benefit from a slightly higher absorption.)
- Optimize the yeast level.
- Allow the dough to proof/rise prior to dressing and baking. Even a couple of minutes can be helpful.
- Increase the dough weight.
- Add a coated (fat-encapsulated) chemical leavening system to the dough to slightly boost the amount of leavening gas during baking. That’s how many “bake-to-rise” pizzas are made.
- The addition of oil to the dough formula (even just 1%) can lubricate the dough for improved expansion properties while also helping to seal the internal cell (crumb) structure. This approach helps better retain leavening gas, which can contribute to an increase in finished crust height/thickness resulting from improved oven spring.
The late Tom “The Dough Doctor” Lehmann was the director of bakery assistance for the American Institute of Baking (AIB), a longtime contributor to PMQ and renowned consultant to the pizzeria industry. This article originally appeared in the March 2020 issue of PMQ Pizza.
