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Can someone explain to me, or give me some links on how dough is affected by the following 'variables': oil vs no oil, baking powder vs yeast, oven temperature (high vs low), water vs milk, egg vs no egg, self rising flower or other flour types (self rising flour, high gluten etc), milk vs water, sugar vs honey, fresh yeast vs dry yeast etc.

I tried doing pizza as the one I get from a restaurant or takeaway, but never succeeded. How important is the cooking temperature?

Thank you.

Stefan Szakal
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    That is a lot of questions--you are basically asking for a book "How does dough work". I suggest browsing the questions in the [Bread] and [Dough] tags, which are clickable. There is a wealth of information there. If you can narrow down to a specific, targeted question, I am sure many of us would be happy to try to answer. – SAJ14SAJ Jul 02 '13 at 18:27
  • Please do edit this if you feel you have a more specific question we can answer! You may find that some of these have also already been answered. mekdigital's answer below is a fairly good demonstration of why this question is too broad - in staying at a reasonable length, it only has time to very briefly address each of your questions. – Cascabel Jul 02 '13 at 23:28
  • I understand its quite a broad subject, I just wanted a summary like how mekdigital did below. Thank you. – Stefan Szakal Jul 03 '13 at 09:14
  • This may help https://skydrive.live.com/?cid=7e66c720fe37c073#!/view.aspx?cid=7E66C720FE37C073&resid=7E66C720FE37C073%21441&app=WordPdf – Optionparty Aug 08 '13 at 08:56

1 Answers1

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Classic Pizza dough is well balanced mix of flour, water, salt and a leavening agent.

All the other ingredients that can be added to the mix have a specific purpose and always add something.

For example the presence of oil: adding a fat to the mix will modify the structure, but different oil will have a different impact, olive oil will make the final baked good softer (and greasier), but a corn oil will make it crispier.

Baking powder is a chemical leavening agent and it's rarely used in pizza dough as it's not fit for the maturation and baking process of pizza.

Oven temperature is one of the most important factor and, with few exceprions, it should be

as hot as you can!

I would not recommend milk in pizza dough, it would be almost surely softer than desired...

No egg is ever added to pizza dough

Pick a finely ground organic flour with high gluten content if are aiming to the best results (as in charred crust with big, airy bubbles)

Some sugar/honey will help the yeast to do a better job, especially if you plan overnight-refrigerated fermenting of the mix

Dry yeast is cheaper, more accessible and easy to keep!

Pizza making at home DOES NOT happen from one day to the other, there is much learning about the culinary process (from preparing the dough to properly choose the type and amount of toppings and sourcing the best ingredients) but you also need to get some skills such as knowing your oven and your kitchen tools, experimenting with different baking sheets, pizza stones, pizza peels... I can assure it will take a while, but it is absolutely worth.

Aaronut
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mekdigital
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    Hi mekdigital, welcome to Seasoned Advice! Members are welcome to promote their sites via their profile, and referencing a related article on your blog/site is also okay, but we ask that you only post links in your answers to pages that are actually directly relevant to the question. Links that don't help answer the question tend to get flagged as spam; since this is otherwise a good answer, I've just removed the link. – Aaronut Jul 02 '13 at 23:39