My Ooni Fyra 12 came yesterday. I’m just going to start with Ooni’s classic pizza dough but … I’m reading this article Make Great Pizza: How to Keep a Dough Log.
Of course keeping a log is a great idea. But I’m impatient! AND this is a serious rabbit-hole.
The article describes the perfect dough as the “… exact right combination of crunch, chew, bite, and snap.” What the heck does that mean? Well, it seems to involve “baker’s math”. I just want a pizza :-0 anyway, I am going to persevere because we are restarting monthly or bi-monthly? family gatherings and I want pizza making to be an activity. My part will be making great dough and taking care of the oven. So baker’s math it is.
Baker’s Math = percentages instead of fractions
So my goal is to find the right percentages of flour, water, yeast, salt, and ? I thought that was all but the articles lists “other ingredients”.
Plot twist: one of the “ingredients” is environment. Seems you have to kawtow to yeast. To Remember: warm = active – cold = less active. More on temperature tracking later – way later. FYI: I will not be using “fresh yeast”.
I always use a digital scale to measure so I’m already on board with that.
My personal development as a pizza maker?
I feel like a spreadsheet or at least a chart is needed.
So the basic columns are date, flour, water, yeast, salt, what when well, what didn’t go well, ? + pictures?
But the article provides above and the beyond help from Mike Vaona of Ooni. He’s is a cookbook author, bread and pizza baker, engineer, and social media influencer! That’s a lot. He shares a list of things he makes note of when he tries a recipe.
Issue … there’s a lot of elements I could track about flour.
Would I use different water? or just water that is different temperatures? ? What is the temp of “luke warm water”?
Desired dough temperature – https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/blog/2018/05/29/desired-dough-temperature
different types of salt? I keep reading dough recipes but I want to stop that!!
Honestly, I just want to have one recipe and repeat but maybe all of that will change once I’m in pizza world.
I’ll share my spreadsheet/chart here once I have version 1.0.
Random Pizza Things to Buy!
STOP IT! they sell a pizza notebook and journal – of course they do. 200 pages!! Am I making pizzas every day? anyway …
? what is a dough hook ? attachment for a stand mixer ?