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On Wed, 22 Sep 2004, Martin Frost wrote: > I like making pizza, but the total time to make and prove dough and > then cook the thing means that we end up eating very late if I start > after work. > > I know that a lot of pizza restaurants use frozen dough, and I'm sure > that many more keep their dough in the fridge. > > What experience do people have with this? Any tips? At which stage > does freezing/refrigeration work best? Does the quality suffer? > (Not that my dough is ever up to much in the first place.) I worked in a pizza place - not a shiny restaurant, just a delivery place, but with fairly decent pizzas. We first used to buy in bases, pre-frozen, and defrost them as we needed them. And then the boss decided that making bases would be cheaper. So we'd make a HUGE big vat of dough, and make bases (and part-bake them) and refrigerate them until they were needed (and sometimes freeze some of them, as well. The ones we made were better, but they were better fresh than refrigerated, and better refridgerated than frozen. We'd leave them in the fridge for three days, max (but this was a huge walk in fridge, so better than a home one, I'd guess). Making pizza-dough is fine if you're home long enough - I don't find it a faff to make the dough and wander off while I'm leaving it to prove. For a properly crispy pizza base, putting the dough in the fridge is a good thing. Let it prove once, and then punch the air out and put it in something airtight and leave it in the fridge - anything from an hour to a few days. It's more elastic afterwards, and you can make a really thin base. If I do this I don't prove it a second time. So there's maybe 20 mins making the dough, and an hour for proving it and getting it into the fridge. I'd guess that if you were going to freeze it this would be the point to do it at. And you could make a huge batch, use some that day for a fluffier pizza by proving it again, pop some in the fridge for a day or two later, and put some in the freezer. Marna
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