By Michael Kalanty
Whenever I’m invited to optimize a pizza dough for an operator, there are several questions I’m asked. What’s the best hydration? What’s the sweet spot, time-wise, for cold fermenting the dough? Which type of “00” flour is better?
All of these questions are valuable, viable and worth pursuit. But, in the end, it always comes down to how much space the operator has, the capacity of the mixer(s), and the available square footage in the cooler. Unless you have the good fortune to be designing your space from scratch, the physical constraints of your operation dictate a great deal about what kind of dough you should be producing.
Whether you have a professional optimize your dough production or you’re savvy enough to do it on your own, the challenge is staying consistent.
Related: Master pizzaiolo and instructor Wilhelm Rodriguez: How to correct 4 common dough-making mistakes
Understanding Capacity
Overloading your physical plant is one of the more common causes of dough mismanagement I find during a consult. As the weekend (or another heavy production time) approaches, it makes sense to simply increase our dough batch sizes. The more dough we can get in the machine, the more pies we can bake and the more revenue we can make. No arguments there.
Starting at the top of the dough production line, first identify the recommended capacity for the mixer(s) you have. The manufacturer’s website is the first place to look. Each model and design has a recommended dough capacity and given hydration.
From personal experience, I get the best mix of lightness, tenderness and structure from a dough when its batch size is about two-thirds of the mixer’s capacity rating.
Choosing the correctly sized mixer for your kitchen is incredibly important. A mixer that is too large will overwork your dough and make it difficult to stretch. A mixer that is too small can harm the long-term reliability of the mixer and lead to expensive maintenance and repair costs as time goes on.
The batch size of your dough formula is the starting point. There are two things to consider here: the overall weight of your ingredients and the hydration of the dough.
The Science of Dough
The hydration of the dough is the total weight of all liquids divided by the total weight of all the dry ingredients. A formula using 55# water and 100# total flour has a hydration of 55%.
Any oil in the dough is also considered a liquid for the purposes of this calculation. Oil relaxes the dough, so it behaves as if it has more water in it. If we were to add 5# olive oil to our sample formula, the total liquid would become 60#. Still using the 100# flour in our equation, the hydration of this dough is now 60%.
Doughs with a low hydration, like many thin-crust pies, are stiff and put more stress on the machine. As a guideline, a low hydration is 55% or less. The lower the dough’s hydration, the more it reduces the capacity of your machine. The 55% dough in this example would be used for a thin to medium pie. At 55%, the dough is considered stiff, and an overly large batch size would put stress on the machine.
With the addition of the olive oil, the 60% dough is relatively softer and easier to handle for the machine. This type of dough is better suited for lighter, airier pies.
All of this information should be available on the manufacturer’s website or through your professional equipment vendor.
Two other ingredients will cause you to reduce your batch size: ice and high-gluten flour. Adding ice as part of the total liquid in your formula is an effective strategy for keeping your dough temperature low. To see how that affects the dough texture on the mixer, let’s return to our 55% dough example from above.
If 50# of water plus 5# ice were used in the mix, the hydration would still be 55%. But the ice only melts as a result of the dough temperature and friction. At the start of the mix, the dough is much stiffer than it will be once the ice has melted. This puts more stress on your machine, and the industry guideline is to reduce your capacity by 10%. A similar reduction of 10% capacity is advised when you’re using high-gluten flour. A protein content of 12.5% and up is a working guideline here.
The Art of Dough
Before they are assigned a capacity by the manufacturer, mixers pass a number of specific tests, producing any number of dough types, cakes, pastries and more. That’s the reliable scientific starting point when correlating your formula’s batch size to your mixer. But the number you should be shooting for with your batch size is not always the rated capacity.
The other thing to consider is the sweet spot for your mixer’s capacity. This is where your sensory skills come into play. This is the artistry of the pizzaiolo and baker. An experienced eye and hand can assess when a dough is optimally developed. It’s part of the art of making dough that you develop the ability to tell when a dough needs more time in the mixer, is a bit overworked or is just right. It’s part of your culinary expertise and is one of those intangibles that puts your style into your pies and make them distinctive.
The sweet spot for batch size varies by the type of dough you’re producing. My personal experience has taught me that I get the best mix of lightness, tenderness and structure from a dough when its batch size is about two-thirds of the mixer’s capacity rating.
Does this mean I sometimes have to run additional batches to meet the production needs for the shop? Yes—Thursday through Saturday, for the most part. But do I get more consistency from my pies with this additional investment of production time? Yes. Am I guaranteed that my customers are getting a consistent product each and every time they dine in or DoorDash out? Yes.
And, given that the weekend sees more customers, it’s required of me to produce the best possible and most consistent quality in the pies during the busier times. More customers add up to a lot more potential for word-of-mouth advertising. I need those mouths to have the best pizza dough I can make them!
Michael Kalanty is the owner of R&D Bakery in San Francisco, an author, and a bakery product developer. His two books, How To Bake Bread: The Five Families of Bread and How To Bake MORE Bread: Modern Breads/Wild Yeast, are used in culinary schools around the world.
