Last Sunday I fired up the pizza oven for the first time since July. I've been out of flour for a bit and decided to to try making dough with the King Arthur's bread flour. The dough itself seemed great, though a little stickier and with more rise than usual; I shaped it and put in the fridge to ferment, but as soon as we started working with it, problems.
First, the gluten strands hadn't really developed as much as I was used to. The dough was very hard to work and had too much spring-back -- with a 9-oz. ball, I couldn't shape a pizza larger than 8" (usally I get a 10"-12" pizza out of that much dough), and two pizzas tore while shaping. I had trouble getting the pizzas off the peels due to sticking, and once the pizza's went in the oven, they cooked very strangely -- burning on the outside, but not cooking fully inside.
So I'm going back to the Giusto's Ultimate Performer that I've had such success with in the past -- and to guarantee that I won't run out, I picked up a 50-lb. bag at Surfa's ($68)! It's going to need to live in my office until I can find a container big enough to store all that flour ( I wonder how many gallons of flour 50 lbs. is?)
