The Doughs Behind Chain Pizza, Buns, Pretzels and Doughnuts

Bread is where chain food is at its most quietly technical, and where a home baker has the biggest available advantage, because time is the main ingredient and you have more of it than a restaurant does.

Four ideas cover almost everything in this hub.

Hydration is the master variable. Water as a percentage of flour weight decides the crumb. A Subway loaf sits around 60 per cent and is tight and soft. A Domino's base sits nearer 65 and is chewier. A pan pizza dough is wetter still, which is why it cannot be handled like a normal pizza dough and why it is pressed into a tin rather than stretched.

Enrichment changes everything it touches. Fat, sugar, egg and milk powder make a dough softer, sweeter, slower to rise and much slower to stale. Every chain bun is enriched. That is why supermarket burger buns go stale in two days and a brioche roll does not.

Cold fermentation buys flavour you cannot buy any other way. Twenty-four to seventy-two hours in the fridge develops the organic acids that make dough taste of something. Domino's does it. Most home pizza does not, which is the single biggest reason home pizza tastes flat.

The finishing step is often the whole identity. A pretzel is ordinary bread dough that went through an alkaline bath. A Krispy Kreme is an ordinary enriched dough that was glazed while too hot to hold. Get the finish wrong and the best dough in the world tastes like a bread roll.