Problem with frozen no-knead dough.. - New York Style - Pizza ...

Author
Topic: Problem with frozen no-knead dough.. (Read 3674 times)
I recently experimented with making and freezing no-knead dough for NY style pizza and it didn't turn out so well. Using Jim Lahey's recipe, I let the dough rise at room temperature for 22 hours, divided it and then froze the dough balls individually. Later the frozen dough balls were transferred to the fridge and allowed to cold ferment a bit before using.
My problem is I think the freezer may have killed the yeast. I baked one dough ball that had been frozen for a week and it hardly rose at all after sitting outside at room temperature for 3 hours. It didn't rise in the oven either and the finished crust was pretty pale and tasteless.
I think I'm familiar with this recipe. Is this the one that has you ferment at room temperature for 24 hours and then cold ferment for 48 hours? If so, I've frozen this dough in screw top Ziploc containers with decent success. I later thawed the dough in the fridge and then used it like normal. I think it rose okay if I recall correctly. Honestly I typically think cold fermented and frozen and thawed dough generally works as good as unfrozen dough. I imagine the recipe is some variation on this one: http://www.bakingsteel.com/blog/72-hour-pizza-dough
I mixed all of the dough ingredients together in a large bowl until no dry flour remained. Covered tightly with saran wrap and set aside for 22 hours to rise at room temperature. The temperature in the house was about 75 F.
The dough, which was bubbly and had risen dramatically, was scraped out of the bowl. Using a little bench flour, I divided it into 3 equal portions that were shaped into balls. One of the dough balls was used the same day to bake a pan pizza. The other two were placed in ziplock bags and moved to the freezer. The first frozen dough ball was transferred to the fridge after 2 days in the freezer and allowed to cold ferment for 48 hours. The resulting pie was acceptable, good texture but lacked a bit in flavor.
The second frozen dough ball was kept in the freezer for 8 days and after thawing in the fridge, cold fermented for 9-12 hours. This one failed to rise even after sitting outside for 3 hours. There were only a few bubbles in the curst. The crust of the baked pie was pale, less crispy, and was a bit chewier and leathery. It tasted more like flatbread than pizza crust. Attached are pictures of the last pie I baked.
Both pies were baked on a 1/4" thick baking steel in a 550 F standard gas oven.
Based on my experience with this recipe, I believe I always did the cold fermenting first and then froze the dough, if I was going to. That might help address the flavor issue. It's interesting that you got so little color on the third pizza, especially with KABF. You can get pretty blonde results if you overferment with sourdough starter since most of the brownable sugars have been used up at that point. You might try adding a couple percent of sugar to dough that you plan on browning and see if that helps at all. What racks are you baking on? I've tried baking on both the bottom and top rack with a steel and find I get the best cornice browning on the top rack.
Usually when one wants to make a dough that is to be frozen, the common practice (the one used by commercial producers of frozen dough balls) is to dramatically increase the amount of yeast. This is done because freezing will kill some of the yeast. Typically, the amount of yeast is doubled or even tripled from what one would use to make a non-frozen dough. However, in your case, increasing the amount of yeast was not an option because the dough recipe you used calls for fermenting the dough at room temperature for 18 hours. That is why the amount of yeast in that recipe (around 0.20%) is so small. Anything much greater than that would probably cause overfermentation. Also, the salt level is on the high side. That is typical of what is used with long, room temperature fermented doughs, with a good example being room temperature fermented Neapolitan style doughs. The high level of salt (2.23% in your case) helps control the rate of fermentation (by suppressing yeast performance) so that the dough doesn't ferment too fast.
After the 18 hours of room temperature fermentation, you might have been able to successfully freeze the dough balls had you kept any further fermentation of the dough to a minimum. Usually, it is only necessary to defrost a frozen dough ball for about a day if kept in the main part of your refrigerator, or less if the dough ball is defrosted at room temperature. I suspect that your dough overfermented and the yeast had pretty much consumed all of the natural sugars released by enzymatic performance (mainly the action of diastatic enzymes) and that the dough was further weakened by the action of protease enzymes on the gluten structure of the dough. If the foregoing analysis is correct, that would have meant that there was little in the way of residual sugars in the dough to support crust coloration at the time of use to make a pizza. If there is little crust color after all that time, the villain is most likely lack of sugar because the yeast has consumed most or all of it. If the yeast then starts to die because of starvation, there isn't enough yeast left to get good oven spring when the pizza is put into the oven. So you will often end up with a white, hard crust. And if it is thin, it can easily be cracker like. I should also add that there are acids that are produced during fermentation, most notably during room temperature fermentation, that lead to crusts that do not have good color.
Maybe there were other factors involved in your case, but the above is my best attempt to explain what might have happened and why. Changing recipes and instructions cause a change in dough chemistry and physics, often making it difficult to diagnose problems that arise because of those changes.
Thanks for the helpful responses everyone. The reasons Peter and Ryan cited above about insufficient yeast makes sense. This was my first experience with freezing dough and after reading other threads on the forum, I realize that in addition to the yeast quantity, there may have been other factors too. People seem to generally recommend freezing after the dough rises. I instead froze it after the first 24-hour rise. What I should have done is let it cold-ferment and then frozen it at the 72 hour mark.
Anyhoo, I'll give frozen dough another shot in the future, but next time using a more standard dough recipe with enough yeast to prevent overfermentation.
Commercial producers of frozen dough balls freeze the dough balls up front, not after a period of fermentation. The pizza chain Mellow Mushroom does the same thing with dough balls that it ships to its stores outside of the Atlanta area.
It is possible to freeze dough balls after a period of fermentation, as is discussed, for example, in the PMQ article at http://digital.pmq.com/pmqmag/201209?folio=16&pg=16#pg16, but there are limitations as to that method. I believe that the first paragraph of the article addresses your situation.