Bear with me for this detailed process of our pizza making, but hoping someone can tell me where we’ve gone wrong.
We made some Neapolitan dough last Sunday afternoon (15th feb) – 337g Ooni 00 flour, 10g salt, approx 0.5g instant drive yeast and 63% hydration.
We made the dough and then stuck the ball straight in a lidded container and into the fridge, where it stayed for 72 hours at 4 degrees.
When it came out 72 hours later (Wednesday afternoon), it hadn’t really grown (not sure if that’s relevant or not).
We then put the container into the freezer until Thursday night as we planned to make the pizza Friday night.
We took it out of the freezer Thursday at about 10pm, where I put it back into the fridge to slowly defrost over night. I then removed it from the fridge at mid day on Friday to come up to room temperature (uk winter, so probably around 10-15 degrees?).
I split the dough into two equal doughballs at 5:30pm (approx 280g), and then left it on a floured plate covered with clingfilm until approx 8:45pm, when we then made the pizzas.
When making, the dough was shrinking back to its starting size, for about 5 minutes, when it finally started loosening up a bit.
When cooked, the dough didn’t puff.
We also did a pizza making class at a pizza restaurant a few weeks ago. We learnt to make the Neapolitan dough there, which we got to take home with us. We took it home and had done more or less the same process with 3 days fermenting, freezing and then defrosting. However, this dough puffed up really well in the same oven and more or less same conditions.
Can anyone help us with where we went wrong with our own dough?
Picture 2 is the dough we made at the restaurant, and picture 1 is the dough we made from scratch at home.
by Smooth_Anxiety_7809
2 Comments
Are you sure your yeast was active? Old or improperly stored yeast can die. Since you got no rising reaction, I’m guessing the yeast needs to be replaced.
Next time let the dough sit out for a few hours so that the yeast gets going, then divide it and put it in the fridge.
If you are going to freeze a dough then you should do it after it has risen. There is a possibility that your recipe was meant to let the dough rise after you took it out of the fridge and divided it, but you froze it before that could happen so your gluten didn’t really form.
There is also a chance you didn’t press out the pizza proper.