Post by albacore on Dec 30, 2015 21:34:01 GMT
It's quiet on here at the moment (not oven building weather!), so I thought I would show details of my dough ball storage system. I make the dough and then bulk prove for two hours before shaping into balls. The balls are stored in small trays until required for making the pizzas.
Each tray comprises a 6mm birch ply frame 12 inch square and 2 3/4 inch tall in old money. The tops and bottoms are 4mm birch ply 12 inch square.
We tend to make fairly small pizzas and use 200 gram dough balls. Each tray will hold five dough balls and of course the trays can be stacked one on top of another, only needing one ply square between each pair of frames.
The trays are sized to fit snugly in my DIY proving box (details to follow in a later post), so I can maintain whatever proving temperature I want.
The birch ply squares double up for assembling the pizzas which are then scooped up off the square with the peel and into the oven.
Using wood gives a very slight drying effect on the dough, creating a thin skin, but not a crust. This makes it easy to pick up the dough balls and hand spread them to the required pizza diameter.
I think some guy in the States has even researched different varieties of wood to see which is the best. I used Birch on the grounds of low taint and a wish to avoid rainforest timber.
We tend to make fairly small pizzas and use 200 gram dough balls. Each tray will hold five dough balls and of course the trays can be stacked one on top of another, only needing one ply square between each pair of frames.
The trays are sized to fit snugly in my DIY proving box (details to follow in a later post), so I can maintain whatever proving temperature I want.
The birch ply squares double up for assembling the pizzas which are then scooped up off the square with the peel and into the oven.
Using wood gives a very slight drying effect on the dough, creating a thin skin, but not a crust. This makes it easy to pick up the dough balls and hand spread them to the required pizza diameter.
I think some guy in the States has even researched different varieties of wood to see which is the best. I used Birch on the grounds of low taint and a wish to avoid rainforest timber.