Pizza with Biga

[texassourdough]

Re: Pizza with Biga

Hi Rossco!

Hang in there! Having only become Dr. Jay in February I am well familiar with the feeling... Baking will be a good way of using your time in the interim...

Soakers are used a lot in whole grain bread additives to prepare the grains (cracked wheat, oatmeal, whatever) so it won't absorb water from the dough during proofing. Reinhart uses soakers a lot in his whole gran bread book but goes beyond the additives, sometimes doing flour as well. It seems to be a neat trick to build flavor and supercharge the yeast. The bacteria will do a little overnight but the enzymes will create a fair amount of sugar which can accelerate the yeast the next day. And in my experience the bread often shows just a small touch of sweetness from having a bit more sugar in the final bread (that may be hallucination - look forward to your thought!) All you need to do is take your preferment flour/biga and not add the yeast. If you do it both ways simultaneously, the soaker based dough should need a little more room temp time (probably an hour or so) to catch up with the biga based dough. (Assuming both get retarded in the fridge for a while before being pulled to warm up and relax before baking.)

The reason I asked about the flour is your hydration is pretty low. You compensate by adding olive oil. Nothing wrong with that, I like oil in BF pizza dough also for it softens the potential toughness of BF dough.

Look forward to hearing of success on Friday!
Jay

[heliman]

Re: Pizza with Biga

Hello Jay ....

Back at work yesterday so brain is not working too well....

I am using "Superb" Baker's Flour - a high gluten flour used by a number of the local pizzerias here.

Sounds like an excellent experiment - will give it a go. Not familiar with that process though - sounds interesting.

On another matter - I am sifting through pics and stuff of the holiday and hope to be able to provide a summary of the pizza experience during Italian tour. There was so much to consider and it has really altered my thinking considerably. Most notable was the da Michele pizza texture - completely different to what I expected. I am wondering now if that is the "benchmark" to aim for or if I should continue making them as I like them and experiment accordingly....

PS: Just heard that I am on track to be "doctored" this Friday!

[texassourdough]

Re: Pizza with Biga

Hi Rossco!

Are you using AP or bread flour? If it is the subtle sweetness you are like, you might want to run an experiment and treat the biga as a soaker - simply mis the flour with water and let sit overnight. That way the enzymes will make sugar but there won't be much going on to consume the sugar until you introduce the yeast. It would make an interesting head to head comparison.
Jay

[heliman]

Re: Pizza with Biga

Latest variation and current recipe.

Biga
Flour 99.9 - 100.0%
Yeast 0.1 - 0.1%
Water 60.0 - 60.0%

Main batch
Flour 391.4 - 100.0%
Water 234.9 - 60.0%
Salt 10.8 - 2.8%
Starter 156.6 - 40.0%
Olive Oil 16.4 - 4.2%

Makes 810 grams.

[njsicilian]

Re: Pizza with Biga

how many pies does the 5qt recipe make and would you do it again?

[heliman]

I found this biga based dough recipe quite good so though that I would share it with others for their comment. I am making the biga tonight for use with pizza dough tomorrow. The resulting pizza dough had a subtle sweetness to it which I found quite pleasant. I would be interested in getting feedback on this or any other biga based recipes for pizza making.

Rossco

Footnote
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I created the biga component using BBA methodology (P107) and upscaled the percentage to my required dough size.