December 1, 2014 - 7:28am
Old dough question
Hello everyone!
I have two different batches of old dough. They were batches of a pizza dough with 70% hydration and 00 flour, and a batch of pretzel dough. I let them proof overnight in the fridge, then got busy and didn't get them baked. Keeping them in the fridge, I put each into it's own plastic bag at about day 3 or 4 then ran into Thanksgiving.
Question is ... What can or should I do with these two old dough batches to use them (and perhaps propagate them) in the best possible way. Am thinking about pretzels again, and want to use the dough, and will be getting back into the pizza business this Thursday or Friday.
Appreciate any help I can get on this.
Thanks
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They will probably make their intended product. Try them and see!
Ford
use dough that I've left in the fridge for days and it works fine for me.
I use old dough pretty often as well - baking it as regular dough. Unless there are visible signs of breakdown, it will still be useful for its intended purpose without having to mix in new ingredients. However, there are a couple changes that do occur that, according to your preference, may make the dough more suitable for a pre-ferment. First, the dough will have a lot more flavor. As far as I'm concerned, this is always a plus for pizza, but I don't know about pretzels. Second, the dough will have developed more gluten strength. If the dough was already on the low to medium end of hydration, it may be tough by now. That will have to be your call. If you do want to mix it into new dough, you can make it as high of a percentage of the new dough as you'd like, it shouldn't hurt anything. If it is tough, then I'd recommend mixing it with the liquid from your recipe first to soften it up, then add the dry ingredients.
If, by chance, the dough has reached the point of breaking down, it is pretty much useless for all but inoculation of new dough. At that point, you really have to treat the old dough like it has no gluten at all, so you can't use much of it or your new dough will not hold together. I know this from experience. There have been a few times when I've left dough in the fridge long enough to reach this point, but that dough also had a high percentage of whole grain flour in it. I've never seen it happen with a dough that only has white flour in it.
Thanks everyone for your thoughts on this. At this point, the dough has been sitting for about 1 1/2 weeks, so I am about to give it a shot and with Fueled by Coffee's idea of mixing in a small percentage into the new dough. I'll do this for both the pretzels and pizza doughs. I'll post something about how it all works out.
Again, Thanks everyone!