I like to make my own pizza dough. Usually I end up with some leftover dough, which I stick in the fridge and then try to make into buns or something for breakfast the next morning. It never turns out very nicely (and I am successful at making bread when that's what I set to do originally). It doesn't seem to brown nicely, and the texture is sometimes a bit strange for what I expect from a bun.
I'm wondering if it's something inherent in the style of dough used for pizza crust or something I'm inadvertently doing with the pizza dough that I wouldn't do with regular dough (maybe using too little, not letting it warm up enough, not enough rising time)?
Here's the dough recipe that I tried this with most recently. So, is pizza dough just too different from bread dough, or is there something I can do to make my leftover dough usable for something other than more pizzas?
Best Answer
I'd say your problem is that the yeast has exhausted the food in the dough before you even get the leftover dough in the fridge. When you pull it out the next morning, the yeast does nothing or very little because there are no more sugars left for it to eat. And not only will this prevent rising, it will also limit browning because it's at least partly the sugars that brown in the oven.
You could work some more flour (and water, to maintain hydration) into your dough as yeast food--maybe even a little sugar if you want--and then rise/form/rise and bake. But at that point you're doing what @tmow suggests--just using your pizza dough as a starter for new bread.