…of adding yeast to recipes such as this one when the dough isn’t given any time to rise and it’s just shaped then baked straight away?
Would it benefit the dough at all? Yeast has two purposes. The flavour from the ferment and a risen dough. It seems to me it’d benefit from neither if done this way.
I make a pizza dough where I add a lot of dried yeast. Whack it in the bread machine, put it straight on the pizza trays after the dough has been “kneaded” by the machine and that’s it. The dough rises on the intensely hot 270C pizza stone in my BBQ and I get a nice thin crust pizza that still has some rise - ie it’s not like a cracker crust…
If there was no yeast it would be as hard as a rock. So the purpose is to provide a slight rise a lot of which is like “oven spring” in bread. Most of the flavour is from the topping, the sauce and high temperature that the bread is baked - so I wouldn’t have said subtle bread flavours are that important in a pizza given that it still tastes “bready” and it is mostly masked by other ingredients anyway.
I once tried using sourdough for the pizza base and it didn’t rise quickly enough and stuck to the pan. I used 5% rye and 15% Wholemeal on that too. Maybe I could have given it more of a chance and experimented more but I went straight back to my tried and true, lightning fast instant yeast with bread flour for the pizza base after that. After all I can knock out the instant pizza dough in 30 minutes and be ready for the topping. YMMV.
Most pizza recipes I know do a full bulk ferment then flatten out into a base, top and bake straight away. I understood that it’s done for flavour and the secret to a great pizza base is time and high end hydration. But I suppose for a quick pizza base, and now you tell me the added yeast does has some effect, it can be done this way too. Thanks for the explanation.