The issue with scaling in baking recipes is often that home bakers are measuring by volume and not mass. Any commercial baker is going to go by mass because with ingredients like flour the amount that’s in 1 cup can vary wildly based on how firmly packed into the cup it is. There are also issues with how long you need to rest 10 pounds of dough vs 1 to ensure it properly hydrolyzes and the fact that pizza dough in pro pizza shops often undergoes a sort of accidental ferment just by nature of the fact that it’s made in large batches then stored.
Oh balls if we’re gonna get into the math for how many billions of yeast cells we’re pitching and time/population curves and all that mess we’re gonna need to take this over to the homebrewing community and talk to someone smarter than me. I just let my rises go until the volume of the loaf has doubled.
Sopuli.xyz has a pretty dope homebrewing community. Not sure if they’re federated here or not, I keep a separate account there from when I didn’t understand how all this worked and thought each instance was basically its own thing
You can and actually do every measurement of a recipe expressed in metric by mass, especially when it comes to bread and pastry and even more for fine pastry.
Even for liquids it is extremely easy to convert volume into mass because 1ml = 1g (for water), which facilitates converting any volume of any liquid into mass.
Even eggs, butter or even olive oil can be easily measured by weight.
So, even if you were to get a recipe expressed in tons for each ingredient, it would be possible to convert it to a homemade recipe by just converting to grams and weigh the required ingredients.
You made me go and review why I had intervened in the thread.
Yes, you are correct. Volume is an extremely imprecise measure for dry ingredients and it was because of that I commented as I did, as the discussion was as commercial baking/cooking revolved around large batches, measured by weight, while family cooking/baking revolves around measurements by volume.
But you get hard pressed to have that problem in recipes expressed in metric, even if we went and tried our best to make matters as complicated as possible and measured liquids by mass.
Biased as I am, if for nothing else, metric uses a decimal base, which facilitates converting between scale units by shifting the point. The representation by fractions used in the imperial system is not that straighforward.
But I wasn’t even considering that in my comment. The point was what you ilustrated very well in you comment: measuring dry ingredients by volume can and will cause deviation in the end result.
I can’t fathom what “one cup, hard packed” means. What if I’m stronger than the original author of the recipe and pack it harder or my dry is coarser or has a different moisture content?
But I can easily understand what half a pound, half and one quarter, etc, precisely requests, although I prefer to have it expressed in metric units as 1lb = 453g, so 1 and 1/2lb is 679,5g, out of personal preference.
In short, they can hold a lot more heat than the stones, mimicking the effect of professional pizza ovens.
So the idea is to cook a pizza in the shortest possible time in order to thoroughly cook the dough and outer layers, whilst leaving the ingredients with a delightful freshness. With a conventional oven the process takes much longer, tending to cook everything evenly, producing a drier pizza in which you don’t get that ‘brick oven effect.’
I’ve tried the stones myself, heating them on max heat for a whole hour beforehand. They can help a bit, but it’s still not the same. All that’s my take on the situation, anyway.
I checked the FV just now and I don’t see a pizza community here that goes in to this stuff. Unfortunately for now, you’ll have to visit the evil empire for more precise info.
agree on scale, I’ve never managed to make a small batch of pizza dough taste right, but used to make restaurant batches 20 odd years ago no worries. I have no idea why it works that way
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The issue with scaling in baking recipes is often that home bakers are measuring by volume and not mass. Any commercial baker is going to go by mass because with ingredients like flour the amount that’s in 1 cup can vary wildly based on how firmly packed into the cup it is. There are also issues with how long you need to rest 10 pounds of dough vs 1 to ensure it properly hydrolyzes and the fact that pizza dough in pro pizza shops often undergoes a sort of accidental ferment just by nature of the fact that it’s made in large batches then stored.
That, but also certain things like yeast don’t scale in normal ratios. You gotta use logs and powers and whatever them fancy math boys do.
Oh balls if we’re gonna get into the math for how many billions of yeast cells we’re pitching and time/population curves and all that mess we’re gonna need to take this over to the homebrewing community and talk to someone smarter than me. I just let my rises go until the volume of the loaf has doubled.
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Sopuli.xyz has a pretty dope homebrewing community. Not sure if they’re federated here or not, I keep a separate account there from when I didn’t understand how all this worked and thought each instance was basically its own thing
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Its an issue with hydrolizing, which is to say the rate at which the flour absorbs the water and begins the process of gluten development.
Stovetop cooking is the intersection of organic chemistry and performance art. Baking is the intersection of organic chemistry and witchcraft.
Are you aware of the metric system?
even in the metric system, measuring by mass is better than volume and most home bakers don’t do it
You can and actually do every measurement of a recipe expressed in metric by mass, especially when it comes to bread and pastry and even more for fine pastry.
Even for liquids it is extremely easy to convert volume into mass because 1ml = 1g (for water), which facilitates converting any volume of any liquid into mass.
Even eggs, butter or even olive oil can be easily measured by weight.
So, even if you were to get a recipe expressed in tons for each ingredient, it would be possible to convert it to a homemade recipe by just converting to grams and weigh the required ingredients.
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You made me go and review why I had intervened in the thread.
Yes, you are correct. Volume is an extremely imprecise measure for dry ingredients and it was because of that I commented as I did, as the discussion was as commercial baking/cooking revolved around large batches, measured by weight, while family cooking/baking revolves around measurements by volume.
But you get hard pressed to have that problem in recipes expressed in metric, even if we went and tried our best to make matters as complicated as possible and measured liquids by mass.
That was why a I replied as I did.
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Biased as I am, if for nothing else, metric uses a decimal base, which facilitates converting between scale units by shifting the point. The representation by fractions used in the imperial system is not that straighforward.
But I wasn’t even considering that in my comment. The point was what you ilustrated very well in you comment: measuring dry ingredients by volume can and will cause deviation in the end result.
I can’t fathom what “one cup, hard packed” means. What if I’m stronger than the original author of the recipe and pack it harder or my dry is coarser or has a different moisture content?
But I can easily understand what half a pound, half and one quarter, etc, precisely requests, although I prefer to have it expressed in metric units as 1lb = 453g, so 1 and 1/2lb is 679,5g, out of personal preference.
Networking AND food? What more could you want
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Fortunately, it sounds like pizza steels do a really impressive job replicating a good oven.
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Tell me more about these pizza steels. I know of stone, but a quick google shows me that steels exist, but why steel over stone?
In short, they can hold a lot more heat than the stones, mimicking the effect of professional pizza ovens.
So the idea is to cook a pizza in the shortest possible time in order to thoroughly cook the dough and outer layers, whilst leaving the ingredients with a delightful freshness. With a conventional oven the process takes much longer, tending to cook everything evenly, producing a drier pizza in which you don’t get that ‘brick oven effect.’
I’ve tried the stones myself, heating them on max heat for a whole hour beforehand. They can help a bit, but it’s still not the same. All that’s my take on the situation, anyway.
I checked the FV just now and I don’t see a pizza community here that goes in to this stuff. Unfortunately for now, you’ll have to visit the evil empire for more precise info.
pizzamaking.com is a great old style forum that has more info than the evil empire
I do wish there was an active community for it here too though
Thanks for the tip!
agree on scale, I’ve never managed to make a small batch of pizza dough taste right, but used to make restaurant batches 20 odd years ago no worries. I have no idea why it works that way