With the growing demand for pastry products, the popularity of dough sheeters and dough presses is booming. With these valuable and innovative items, shaping a chunk of dough is as easy as eating a delicious pie. These incredible and handy machines make life so much easier. In this article, you will learn how to use one or how to use a dough press.
What Is a Dough Press?
A dough press is a very convenient, simple machine widely used by bakeries, restaurants, and other food establishments that serve food that has or needs the dough to complete their menu. It gave birth to many names such as pizza press, tortilla press, cookie press, and others, but they are still a kind of dough press at the end of the day. This kind of machine helps bakers, chefs, or the ordinary cook to flatten their dough into a circular shape with their preferred thickness for their pizza, tortillas, and other similar items.
Manually kneading the dough and the hand-tossing technique had been left in the dust by the dough press in terms of quality service and productivity. This is not to say that manual kneading and hand-tossing are useless to this day and age, it can still provide entertainment, but that is pretty much about it. If you are opting for productivity and fast-paced production of goods, you can bet your business fortune to dough presses.
Operating a Dough Press
Using a dough press should be an easy task. The main idea of using this device is that you put a piece of dough onto the plates of the device, bring those plates together, and then you should have a flattened dough, then that’s it. No special or complicated system is needed to operate the device. Just bring those plates together, and you will see the result in no time.
Three Types of Dough Press
Knowing ‘how to use a dough press’ is just as important as knowing the two types of a dough press and how to utilize them to your great advantage. There are commonly known as the cold-pressed dough, hot-pressed dough, and hand-pressed dough.
The Cold Pressed Dough
The name cold-pressed dough is justified by its high-water absorption, which can create a satin-soft dough. This kind of soft satin dough produced can make a completed crust features like an inner crumb framework.
Given this dough’s trait from the cold press forming method, it won’t achieve the excellently- defined formed rim to the crust. However, even if a soft satin dough won’t have that nice edge into the crust, it can still have a crispy texture to the sides and the bottom when it is cooked. A soft dough can only achieve this because you need to press it down firmly in a pan, and it will then stick closely to the pan and make that crunchy crust we all came to love.
The Hot-Pressed Dough
As you may have guessed, the hot-pressed dough is the complete opposite of the cold-pressed dough here in our how to use a dough press guide. While the cold-pressed dough uses lower temperatures, this one uses higher ones. They also differ in the kind of dough they produce.
While the cold-pressed dough produces a soft satin dough, the hot-pressed dough produces a dry and a rough dough. This is good for a thick-crusted pizza because it can be immediately be put on a cooking pan or tray. The final crust it produces is crispier than that of the cold-pressed dough; however, it can lose its crispiness when put out of the oven.
The Hand-Pressed Dough
The last but not the underdog of how to use a dough press guide is the hand-pressed dough. This is the oldest form of processing dough and as old as the pizza itself. It requires more effort than the cold and hot-pressed dough because, with this method, you use your own hands to shape the dough to your liking.
Compared to the other two, the hand-pressed method is the most tender to the dough. Like the cold-pressed method, the dough produced by hand is also a soft dough which can turn into a crispy dough when cooked.
Have you ever wondered why chefs and bakers toss their dough in the air like a big show-off? It turns out there’s a reason why they are doing that entertaining toss. The toss’s spinning motion helps the dough form its circular shape, and the air above the dough helps dry the dough. The good this about this is the drier the dough becomes, the more that it will have that crispier crust when it is baked.
A distinguishing attribute of a hand-pressed dough is its “airy” form. This is the case because the dough isn’t degassed extensively as the first two forms. The resulting crust will have softer bites because of the dough’s gentle treatment during the forming process.
If you have ever eaten a pizza with hand-made dough, you will tell the difference between a hand-made one and a machine. A hand-made dough will always have that unique trait of crispiness and flavor.
You are the judge on who can deliver the best dough and crust experience between the three types of dough press. Know more about doughs.
Conclusion
Now that you know how to use a dough press give it a try and create something beautiful. Making mistakes is not an option because, as we mentioned earlier, using a dough press is reasonably easy compared to other tasks. The important thing is you will enjoy what you are doing.