Pizza dough not developing any bonds
Hi, we are a wood fired pizza and bread shop that opened up in May and we have been having a strange issue with our pizza dough for the last few days. Our dough is naturally leavened contains no other ingredients except hard spring wheat flour, sea salt and water. Most of our dough bulk ferments overnight and is shaped first thing in the morning for the lunch and dinner crowd. We started out making 14 inch pizzas using 14 oz of dough and experienced some tearing as we were stretching it out. We kept experimenting with increasing the dough weight until we settled on 16 oz. This worked for a while but in the last week, the dough started doing something completely different. It tears very easily when we stretch it out. The tears are not like stretch tears, it almost looks like it is disintegration or just falling apart. My first suspicion is that the person making the dough had accidently used AP flour but they insist that this isn't the case. It's like the dough has not developed any gluten strength. Here are a few questions:
Could the particular batch of flour we are using be bad?
Is it possible the dough is over fermenting? The shaped balls do seem to have a lot of gas in them when we go to use them. Maybe a little more than normal.
Should we be mixing the dough longer to develop the gluten?
Any other thoughts or ideas are welcome.
Attached is a photo of one of the doughs we were stretching. It's an extreme example but makes the point.
Thanks in advance for all your help.
What is your method of kneading and how long?
How high is the hydration?
What yeast do you use?
What are the proportions?
To know if you have developed the gluten enough try the "window pane test".
Naturally leavened you say.. At a glace it looks like too much acidity. Acid is beneficial in that it tightens gluten but too much will result in a dough that tears easily and takes far too much energy to work-out the resistance.
Firm or wet starter?
That looks like some pretty broken down dough, could also be the result of dramatic over fermentation, though if your pre shaped rounds hadn't fallen it probably hadn't gotten super crazy out of hand, have you tasted any of the dough? have you baked any and tasted the resulting pizza? did it get the color it usually gets?
Looks like the dough has been way over-fermented. Question: is the bulk ferment at room temp or in a walk in? If it was a walk in, I bet that your walk-in is running too hot, ran low on coolant, or someone left the door cracked overnight (another possability is there was a power-outage, or something similar during the night).
When i was working at the bagel bakery, we had this strange issue of our bagels ending up far too fermented every once in a while, the owners kept thinking it was the starter freaking out, but it ended up being that the coolers were overworked at times when we loaded so many bagels, and was running at too high of a temp.
Two things to consider - one try it with a different batch of flour and the other, try a different starter.
I think the biggest challenge here is not freaking out or falling prey to crazy explanations (easier said than done). Take one variable at a time (although you can run a number parallel batches) and figure it out.
Flour. Did this change at all?
Mixing.
Staff (which can affect any of these other variables by forgetting salt or leaving the mixer going way too long so the dough is overworked).
Salt.
Fermentation conditions.
As others have said, that looks like dough that has had too much protease activity. Fermentation time?
I would also look at flour (bad batches are out there), and whether the formula was followed correctly (including mixing).
I think it looks like the gluten never lived. I didn't read that you ever fed the yeast some sugar and just added salt which kills the yeast.