In Lehmann's Terms
By Tom Lehmann | The Dough Doctor

Question: We are presently using deck ovens in our store but we are looking at air impingement ovens for a second store. I keep hearing conflicting reports about the air impingement ovens not being able to bake pizza with a crispy, hearth-baked characteristic. What's the real story?

Answer:
A number of years ago a lot of effort on the part of the major air impingement oven companies went into developing baking profiles that would effectively simulate a hearth-baked characteristic. To a great extent these baking profiles were successful, but they never really fully captured all of the unique characteristics of a hearth-baked pizza. Recently, we have worked with Lloyd Pans (www.lloydpans.com) to develop a baking disk to impart these unique characteristics. So what we have now is a new, hearth bake disk which, when combined with a properly set-up air impingement oven, and a sugar free dough, gives a finished pizza with all of the desired hearthbaked characteristics – such as crispiness, light, bubbly raised edge, and moderately blistered bottom appearance, which also imparts a unique flavour to the crust that used to only come from hearthbaked pizzas. The answer to your question is yes, it is possible to get a true, hearth-baked characteristic on pizzas coming out of an air impingement oven.

Since different oven manufacturers, and even different ovens within a manufacturer's product line will require different finger profiles for a hearth-baked characteristic, it is suggested that you contact your oven manufacturer to find out what finger configuration is recommended for your particular oven. Then, begin experimenting with baking temperatures in the range of 243 to 254˚C, with baking times in the range of 5 to 6 minutes. Experiment to determine which temperature and baking time gives you the best overall results. If you happen to have one of the new Lincoln FASTBAKE ovens, set the temperature at 252˚C and the baking time at 5 minutes and you're good to go.

Question:
How do you make a good emergency dough?

Answer:
I'm really not sure that you can make a "good" emergency dough, but you can make an effective one that will allow you to keep your doors open when you might have had to otherwise close down due to the fact that you didn't have any dough with which to work. You might lose your dough due to any number of reasons, but the most common ones include loss of power during the night, resulting in your cooler warming up to the point where the dough began to actively ferment and grow right out of the dough boxes. In short, it "blew." Another common reason to lose a dough is because of an ingredient scaling error such as: the yeast was not added, sugar or salt were not scaled, or the salt was scaled as the sugar (after all, they do look alike), and it was scaled again as the salt (trust the voice of experience, it can and does happen). Whatever the reason for dough failure, it is not pleasant to come into your store in the morning to discover that you don't have any usable dough for the day. This is where an emergency dough comes into play. This is also not the time to be thinking about weighing up a dough that has radically different ingredients or ingredient amounts from your regular dough, so for the sake of simplicity, and comfort level, we want to keep the emergency dough as close to our regular dough as possible. The easiest way to accomplish this is to base our emergency dough on our regular dough formulation with only some minor changes to allow it to function as an emergency dough. Here are the recommended changes needed to convert your regular pizza dough into an effective emergency dough:

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