Pizza dough, like most bread, is chiefly flour, water, yeast, and salt. But lots of recipes,
including my own, call for some amount of oil and some amount of sugar. What do those
add-ons actually do? Well, according to my experiments, which I'm now going to show you,
sugar makes the dough sweeter, obviously. But more noticeably than that, sugar causes
the dough to retain water during baking, which could be a good or a bad thing.
Oil makes the dough more rich and moist, obviously. It also makes it bake a little faster,
but oil weakens the dough, which is the negative way to say it. The positive way to
say it would be oil tenderizes the dough. None of these things are objectively good or
bad. It all depends on what kind of effect you're going for, with the possible exception of yeast.
I tried using less yeast, zero yeast, extra yeast. And my findings there were
surprisingly conclusive. LAUREN: “That one’s good.”
ADAM: “Tastes more yeasty. Really yeasty.” LAUREN: “It has a gummy texture. It smells
like an armpit.” ADAM: “Oh, God.”
LAUREN: “Nope, I'm not doing that.” ADAM: “Oh, I’m gonna spit it out.”
Yeah. Up to a point, more yeast is good. Those are my big-picture findings, but I learned a
lot of other little interesting things along the way. Let me show you my methodology.
Eight different sample doughs in eight separate containers. Got to keep them each labeled through
the whole process. Each is going to be built on half a cup of water, 118mL. That's about what I
normally use for a home-oven-sized pizza. Top lefty there is my reference recipe,
my normal pizza dough, which has about half a teaspoon of granulated sugar per pizza.
Some of these are going to get less sugar, no sugar, double sugar. Then yeast. Normally I do
about half a teaspoon of active dry yeast for a single pizza. Some of these are going to get
less yeast, no yeast, double yeast. And I'm isolating the variables here. Each of these
doughs is different from my reference dough in only one aspect. That's important, right?
Now check this out, I'm going to slow the video back down to real time, and you're going to see
the yeast in top righty there bloom conspicuously. That is happening in real time, right there.
And that's the sample with double yeast. Not one of the other samples is blooming so
spectacularly. The lesson there is don't assume your yeast are dead if they don't bubble and foam
really dramatically. It depends how much yeast are in there relative to the water.
These are all showing less dramatic signs of life, even bottom lefty, which has no sugar
for the yeast to eat. The yeast have their own internal energy stores, just like you and I do,
and their metabolic processes resume as soon as we get them wet, with or without sugar.
Normally I would just eyeball the olive oil, but I'm guessing I do about a teaspoon per pizza. So,
some of these will get half that much oil, no oil, double oil, et cetera. Salt I'm keeping standard,
half a teaspoon of Morton kosher for each. Flour is going to be constant. 150 grams of King Arthur
bread flour per dough, that's about a cup, because bread flour is heavier than all purpose flour.
Protein is heavy. This is going to give me a dough hydration of about 80%, which is pretty
wet and what I have been favoring lately, since I have moved to a no-knead or low-knead dough.
I'm not even touching these with my hands. I'm just getting each one stirred up with a spoon
until all the flour is wet. The most bread flour you can possibly stir in with a spoon,
that's generally going to get you the perfect hydration for no-knead pizza dough. Already,
there are differences. The samples with more yeast are noticeably wetter, even though they
have the same exact amount of water and flour. Today's video is really a practical experiment,
not a science explainer. I will give you my best guess as to what is happening, science-wise.
Active dry yeast that is sold like this in the store is generally packaged with
an emulsifier to help the yeast rehydrate inside your dough.
My guess is that emulsifier may be helping the whole dough to suck more water into
its constituent particles, and that gives it the effect of seeming, at this stage,
more wet, even though it has the same amount of flour and water. But that's just a guess.
These are all done. Time to pack them up, and it occurs to me that the labels are
upside down from your perspective. That's quality filmmaking, Ragusea. And then,
like I normally do, I'm going to put these straight into the fridge for a slow, cold rise,
which I'm quite confident results in superior flavor, but we can A-B test that another day.
Here's an A-B test that we can do right now with the sponsor of this video,
Surfshark. Without Surfshark, I cannot stream the latest Great British Bake Off eps from Channel
Four, because Four is a British public broadcaster and I'm in the U.S. But if I connect via one of
Surfshark's VPN servers in the UK, I can stream as many Victoria sponges as I please. Getting around
national boundaries and internet censorship is one of the many benefits of a Surfshark membership.
Funneling your traffic through an encrypted VPN server also keeps anybody on your wifi network
from snooping on you, and Surfshark comes with tons of other internet security tools, like Clean
Web. Turn that on on any device and you will block lots of malicious ads, malware, phishing attempts,
that kind of thing. Hit my link in the description and use my code ADAMRAGUSEA at checkout. You can
get 83% off Surfshark, plus three months free. Just enter ADAMRAGUSEA at checkout,
all one word, 83% off. Thank you, Surfshark. So anyway, for pizza dough, I would normally do a
bulk ferment. That's where you mix up dough for a whole bunch of pizzas all in one giant ball,
and then you just let it sit for a while, let it autolyze, let it ferment at least part of the way.
Then you punch it down, break it down into individual doughs,
maybe fold them a little bit, and then rise those individually to bake later.
Here, I obviously could not do a bulk ferment because all eight recipes are different,
but I still want to give them a second rise, which is why I'm pulling them out,
folding them a few times, because that's all the kneading a dough this wet could possibly require,
and then I'm oiling the containers so that I'll be able to get the finished
doughs out without really tearing it up. Folding the dough partway through the fermentation
process results in a fluffier bake, which I'm honestly not even sure I prefer for pizza. So,
it's certainly not necessary, not for a flatbread. Anyway, back in the fridge for at least a day.
But I like to do many days. For up to a week and maybe even beyond,
you get progressively more intense flavor with the more fermentation that happens as you go.
I have a whole video about that in the description where you can see a dough at one day old,
two days old, three days old, et cetera. These are now five days old and I'm going to bake
them. It is pizza dough, but I'm not baking pizza with it. I'm baking what my kids call pizza bread.
Gently pull the dough out without deflating it, turn it upside down so the bubbly side is on top.
Smear that with olive oil, top with black pepper, coarse salt, and garlic powder. Bake at maximum
heat on a hot stone or steel. This will be less wasteful than baking eight full pizzas. I can bake
four at a time, so all four will get a similar bake and that'll help us isolate the ingredient
variables. Plus with pizza bread, you can assess the dough itself a little bit more easily. Its
more subtle characteristics will not be drowned out by the sauce and the cheese and all that.
Got to keep the label with the bread at all times, or this entire exercise will have been for
nothing. Here's my reference dough, my standard recipe; a teaspoon of oil, half a teaspoon each
of sugar and yeast. Tastes great, fluffy yet moist and chewy, nice fermented yeasty flavor,
and a very subtle sweetness that I only notice after I've been chewing on it for a sec.
In fact, let's first consider the effects of sugar on the dough. As you saw, all
seven of my doughs that had yeast in them were able to rise just fine with or without sugar.
This is because flour generally has enzymes in it that will break the starch molecules down into
fermentable sugar that the yeast can actually eat and ferment and all that kind of good stuff. So,
sugar is absolutely not necessary. Here is my normal dough with half a
teaspoon of sugar. Here is my dough with zero sugar. The zero sugar dough puffed up almost
as tall in the fridge, though it feels... ADAM: "Less sticky. Less sticky, Adam."
That's me leaving notes for myself, which I'm sure sounds totally normal and not at all crazy.
Once baked, the zero sugar dough looks a lot browner, but I think that mostly had to do with
its position in the oven. It is generally agreed upon that sugar enhances browning in bread, but
this experiment was not able to isolate that particular variable. Anyway,
we can to talk about the internal taste and texture difference, which is very noticeable and
it has very little to do with sweetness. ADAM: "I can vaguely taste, at the end
of the bite, I can taste the relative lack of sweetness."
Nevertheless, pizza dough with no sugar in it tastes really different, or at least the texture
is different. It is fluffier and it is chewier. Sugar weakens gluten, and it retains water during
baking. I think the lack of sugar here allowed more water to convert to steam, and the stronger
gluten network was more able to capture that steam in the form of bubbles, hence fluffier texture.
And the taste of the zero sugar dough is more bready. Sorry, that's the best thing that I can
think of to describe it. It's more of that pure, cleaner taste of plain bread. I would not say that
I prefer it to my standard dough that has a little sugar in it. To me, they're just two totally
different things with their own pros and cons. Though too much sugar is definitely a thing.
This dough got double sugar, a full teaspoon, and you can see it puffed up a little more. We got a
gassier fermentation out of it, and it is very sticky. That would be much more challenging to
shape into a thin crust pizza and have any hope of sliding it off the peel into the oven. Once baked,
you can see the difference in the interior texture, which is very moist and dense, almost
like it was under-baked. Lauren was not a fan. LAUREN: "It tastes like it's a savory bread
that is wanting to be a cinnamon roll."
Yeah, and that's not because it tasted sweet. It did not taste particularly sweet to me,
but sugar holds on to water, so less water was able to escape as steam during baking. You also
have less steam puffing up the texture, and you have a weaker gluten network that is less able
to expand into bubbles in response to that vapor pressure. So, the resulting bread is
texturally cakey. Sugar is responsible for that cakey texture, at least in part.
And that could actually be nice in say a thick-crust pizza, but for
a typical thin crust, nah, I don't think I'm ever going to use more than half a teaspoon
of sugar per small pizza ever again. How about oil? Sample number two here
has absolutely no oil inside it, just a thin coating on the outside. It seemed rise just
as high as my reference recipe, but the raw dough was noticeably stickier. Maybe that's
just a lack of the lubricating effect of oil. And despite baking in the hottest corner of my oven,
it baked up lighter than the others in the same batch, except for that one burned patch there.
Really, the zero-oil dough needed another minute or two in the oven,
and this makes sense. Oil speeds up cooking. This is because oil can get much hotter than water can,
liquid water, and because oil is such an effective thermal interface. I have
a whole video about that in the description. But if you look past that slight under-baked taste
and texture, the interior of the no-oil bread is quite nice. Again, I would just describe it as
more bready than my typical pizza dough, more of the pure taste and texture of bread without the
extra richness and moisture of the oil. LAUREN: "They're very fluffy."
Yep, that makes sense. Fat weakens gluten. So without fat, this was able to form
bigger bubbles in the oven. It got more oven spring from the steam. The resulting texture
is pillowy, which again, I would not say is intrinsically better or worse than my
normal dough. It's just a different vibe. Over here is my dough with double oil. Actually,
I think I might have given it triple oil. The raw dough is not especially sticky to the touch,
but it is softer. I can tell that if I tried to stretch this out thin, it would probably rip.
Fat weakens gluten, so that makes sense. Bake that up. Very crispy bottom on that. It
looks pretty similar inside, but wow does it taste different.
LAUREN: "Oh, you can tell." ADAM: "It just falls apart in your mouth."
LAUREN: "Yeah." Fat is the other thing that gets
you cakey texture. Fat weakens gluten, so you get this very tender, very yielding bread. Your teeth
cut through that bread like a hot knife through butter. Which again, could be a very nice thing in
a thick crest pizza, so I'm not going to call this objectively good or bad. But I'm going to get much
less ambivalent when we talking about yeast. This is my batch with half my normal amount
of yeast. You can see that we got a feeble rise with just a quarter teaspoon of yeast,
and the underside has less of the bubbly surface that holds oil and crisps up really nice when I
do pizza bread, so boo to that. The low yeast dough bakes up a little bit flatter and you
can see the bottom layer is gummy and doughy. I think that's because our feeble fermentation
did not create enough seed bubbles in there. There were no little pockets for
steam to build up and expand, and the taste... LAUREN: "It tastes like bath water or something.
I don't know." ADAM: "Yeah, it just
doesn't taste as good." :AUREN: "No."
Here's the thing. Much of the stuff in bread doesn't taste very good. Warm, wet flour
doesn't taste good. I think that's the bath water taste that Lauren was talking about.
What makes it taste good is high heat, which you only get on the exterior of the bread.
On the interior, what makes flour taste good is fermentation. The chemical products of
fermentation taste great, and we simply have less of them in this bread that we baked with
less yeast. We can take that to its logical extreme in this dough that has zero yeast.
I thought it might ferment a bit. Flour has some yeast in it naturally,
the environment in your house has yeast in it naturally. And if we had left this
at room temperature, it probably would've puffed up a bit, like a sourdough starter,
but not in the fridge. Not enough yeast to overcome the cold. It feels like Play-Doh.
And here it is baked. It puffed up a little bit in the oven, purely from steam,
but I still don't really want to eat it. LAUREN: "In the name of science.
Oh, it smells like an armpit." ADAM: "Oh, oh God."
LAUREN: "Nope, I'm not doing that." ADAM: "Oh, I'm gonna spit it out."
LAUREN: "No." Yeah, basically that tasted
like a raw flour tortilla. Cook a tortilla, and it tastes pretty good, because effectively it has
no inside, only outside, and the outside got high heat which made it taste good. This massive
unfermented interior just tastes like warm, wet flour, which is strikingly similar to warm, wet
dog hair. Even grosser than I was expecting. But here's where things get really interesting.
My batch with double yeast. Normally, I would use about half a teaspoon of yeast
for a small home-oven-sized pizza. This one got a full teaspoon. It did not rise
up that much more than my reference recipe. It is noticeably stickier and more delicate to handle.
It baked up a little bit lighter. I think that was just oven position, though. The interior is maybe
a little of fluffier than the reference recipe, but what really stands out is the flavor.
The flavor of the double yeast dough was outstanding, by far our favorite. It was
just so yeasty and fermented and funky and sour. It was noticeably sour, which I realized
not everybody might like, but I sure did. Certainly there's got to be an upper limit on
yeast. Too much fermentation definitely weakens the gluten and potentially creates too much gas.
This causes breads to over-proof and collapse, but that doesn't really matter when you're making
a flat bread like pizza or pizza bread. One of the many reasons I like making pizza
and naan another flat breads here are at home is because flat breads are just way less fussy. They
leave you a much wider margin of error than tall breads. Tall breads, a lot more can go wrong, and
I generally leave them to the professionals. Really, the only downside to extra yeast that I
see in pizza making is the gluten problem. Too much yeast and it will not be able to stretch
out super thin into a thin crust pizza without tearing. But for a thick crust pizza, I'm going
double yeast from now on. I'm sure there's an upper limit on that, but I have not yet hit it.
In contrast, my children have hit their upper limit on pizza bread. It's somewhere between
three and four loaves. I'll notify the science journals immediately.