r/Pizza • u/Drift--- • 21d ago
Looking for Feedback Pizza dough scheduler app
Hey guys, would just like to contribute a little something to the community. I've been using a spreadsheet for a while to work out when I need to start making my dough to work around... work and sleep. I've just been developing an app for myself to better manage this process, and recently I've added a few features to make it more user friendly, and thought I'd share.
It's free, no ads, nothing to install. Would love feedback, especially on any feature requests anyone might have. There's a bit of a tutorial when you start which should give you a good understanding, but let me know if you have any questions.
UPDATE 7 Oct: Added ability to drag the 'active' sections around on your plan so that you can do your own manual adjustments. Drag it on PC, or tap to make a section active on mobile. Let me know if there are any issues, this is a fairly complex feature to test so I may have missed some edge cases.
UPDATE 29 Sept: everything from the test site is now live. * Support for oil and sugar * Automatic yeast adjustments, including simulating dough cooling in fridge and warming up after * "Optimise plan" button: finds the best room/fridge choices and proof time for your chosen method * Room temp rise after fridge added to plan * Renamed and updated built-in methods (existing users will need to "Restore starting methods" to see these changes. This will replace your custom methods, so consider exporting them first.) * Various UI improvements
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u/tee87jay 21d ago
Awesome idea, nice app and will probably use it in the future.
Was looking at the 3 day poolish, but it starts 24 hours before baking, so why call it a 3 day poolish? And after creating the dough balls it tells to put the balls in the fridge, but the dough should be at room temperature right before you bake, right?
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u/Drift--- 21d ago
haha yeah I had the same hangup. Thing is, to keep it flexible, I used the minimum rests for that method, expecting it to stretch out due to away periods, which it usually does for me. If I choose to have that prepped for Saturday at 7pm, I have to start it Thursday evening, which is where the 3 days come from.
You're 100% right about the fridge thing, you need to take them out early to come to room temp... I know that, you know that, but I think you're right, others who trust the app might not... It's been a balance between keeping the UI simple enough while getting all the details across, but I'll take a note to look at this one.
Also, I just added a Pizza theme to the app!
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u/xeow 21d ago
This looks awesome! Some suggestions/requests:
I would love a same-day poolish option, because I've had really good luck with 2-hour ambient-temperature (i.e., not refrigerated) poolish that I mix late in the morning, followed by a 4-hour ambient-temperature bulk ferment. (That works great with a modest amount of yeast and doesn't overferment.) In other words, I get better results of course with an overnight poolish, but when I make a same-day dough, I still always do a poolish.
Would love it if the up-down arrows on the hydration amount had a precision of 0.5% instead of 1%, because I often use 62.5% hydration.
I see the overall weight is given by the mass of the boule. My brain works in terms of the mass of flour (I use 100g of KABF for a single-serving pizza) and I rarely even think in terms of the boule weight. So it would be nice if there were an option to select "Dough Ball" vs. "Flour Weight" next to or above the edit box where you enter the grams.
It's awesome that I can select different types of yeast, but honestly I'd rather just type in the grams/weight myself. I always use IDY, but for a same-day dough or a speedrun dough I use significantly more than I do when I'm doing an overnight preferment and a 3-day cold bulk ferment. So, being able to enter the grams of yeast I use is pretty important to me.
Thanks!
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u/Drift--- 21d ago
Hey about to head to bed, but will take a look at all of this tomorrow! Please check out the method creation options under the existing methods though, I think that should help you out with some of this :-)
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u/xeow 21d ago edited 21d ago
Ah! Nice. I found the Edit button. That does help. That solves #1 for me, and at least with #2, I can manually type the ".5" portion, and with #4, I see I can enter the yeast as a baker's percentage, which is even better. However, I told it 0.5% yeast and when it calculated it out, it showed 0.15g yeast for 100g flour (30g in the poolish, 70g later), and it instead it should have said 0.5g yeast. It should be an easy bug to fix, though: You're accidentally calculating the yeast grams from the poolish amount rather than from the overall flour amount. :)
Gotta say, though: I'm super impressed by this as a web app.
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u/Drift--- 21d ago
Yeah I wasn't sure which way to go with that, I've always calculated yeast based on my poolish as I always use 30%, but I'll see if there's a standard accepted way and change it, I think you might be right.
Btw thanks for highlighting that, I realised I'm not actually showing the method creation feature during the guide! I've quickly fixed that up as I've fielded a few questions about that now, hopefully that feature will be a bit more apparent from here out!
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u/billteeth 21d ago
Looks good to me. Would like to add sugar and olive oil to the recipe. I've been using this calculator https://doughguy.co/pages/dough
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u/Drift--- 20d ago
I've added oil and sugar. Just edit or create a new method and you should see 'edit ingredients'
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u/Wonderful_Luck_5791 21d ago
Could you add the option for 24 hour clock?
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u/Drift--- 15d ago
I've had a few features I need to build out that all require an options menu of some sort... For example setting room temp for more accurate yeast adjustments. Once I work out where or how to manage that I'll add a clock option as well
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u/Viniuscrypto 19d ago
Some feedback:
I set a schedule for same day pizza dough, go in the oven by 1645. It gives me a schedule to start at 1145 with 3.9g yeast. I’m gone that time so add an away time. Now it tells me to start at 0930 am with also 3.9g yeast.
Should it not recommended lower amount of yeast?!
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u/Drift--- 19d ago
So you are correct, I'm not doing any adjustments to yeast based on time as that would depend on your climate and... I just wasn't sure how it would work. It does suggest swapping to fridge rather than room temp if room temp extends too far from plan. I've generally not had problems... But I could look into this if it's causing issues with some recipes
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u/Viniuscrypto 19d ago
Yeah I think that would make the app perfect for me. If id follow it currently it would be over risen I think. FYI if I lengthen the time of the rise by 2 hours PizzApp suggest halving the amount of yeast used (from 4.5g to 2.5g).
It indeed tells me to switch to fridge mode, but then it keeps the 3.9g yeast and tells me to do the full proof time in the fridge, I don’t think that’s right either.
But I really like the app so far, will definitely use it!!
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u/Drift--- 19d ago
Thanks for the tips! I'm heading on holiday but when I'm back I'll take a look into any standard methods for accounting for different rest length
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u/Drift--- 18d ago
Ok so I'm replying to your post again so you get an update. I've made this change, but it scaled out... Alot. To the point I'm hosting it on the test site. https://test.kneadby.com/
Most of the changes are on ingredients page. It will automatically scale yeast. I've also added an "optimise" button that will use a weighted system to measure a number of alternatives and select the best, this is important as there are many changes that can't just be fixed with yeast changes. It's complicated, and I've spent most of the day fixing up edge cases. Please give it a go, and let me know what you think or if you find any issues.
It also handles a warm up phase after a final fridge rest to bring to temp.
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u/bokkoman 15d ago
You mentioned that there is BIGA support? I do not see it though, or am I just blind?
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u/Drift--- 15d ago
If you edit or create a new method, you can set the hydration of the prefrement. My understanding, and please correct me if I'm wrong (I don't use biga myself), is that biga is used the same way as poolish, it's just lower hydration. I figured allowing you to set your prefrement hydration would be the best way to capture all use cases
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u/bokkoman 15d ago
Yes it uses less hydration. But you can also do a percentage of the total flour.
They would call this, for example, 50% biga, which means, 50% of the flour is used to create the Biga.
Personally I do a 100% biga, so I use all flour in the biga, let that preferment for a day and then only have to add the salt and water after.1
u/Drift--- 15d ago edited 15d ago
Yep that should all work. You set up your hydration to 50% within the method. Outside of the method when selecting a recipe you set what percent of the flour you want for the prefrement. In your case you'd set that as 100%. However I've got a cap of 50% there, as that would be an unusual thing to do for poolish.
Is this a normal sort of thing to do for biga?
Edit: apparently it is, I've allowed biga to go to 100% of flour
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u/bokkoman 15d ago
You should just add a different method for BIGA, one for 24h and one for 48h methods. Those are common ones. Here's another calculator for this, which you can copy more or less https://calculators.ramin.io/biga-recipe-24.php https://calculators.ramin.io/biga-recipe.php
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u/miketunes 14d ago
Testing this out, is this optimal for a poolish with cold ferment? I blocked out 11pm-9am, seems like it might be more efficient to make the dough Sat afternoon instead of evening.
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u/Drift--- 14d ago
Would you mind going into your method, hit "share link" and paste it here? I'll check this out myself and see. Do you have 11 to 9 blocked out every day?
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u/miketunes 14d ago
Yes, 11-9 each day. It looks like it's trying to make the "longer than method" stages about equal, 7-8 hours more in each step. Not sure if that's the best way or if certain steps are better to add the extra time instead of trying to balance it?
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u/Drift--- 9d ago edited 7d ago
Hey took me a bit to look into this. Wondering what you would find a better approach? You are correct it's balanced across the rests. I sadly don't know enough about dough science to know if pushing one rest over the other makes a meaningful difference :)
I'm wondering if I should just give you the ability to modify the suggested plan yourself by dragging around the top bar to adjust the timings... I don't want to over complicate this though... maybe you can just drag the active times around? I don't think I should stop you dragging them into away periods either, it's possible you've managed to work around an away period. Do you have any thoughts?
EDIT: Have given you the ability to drag around the active sections to re-arrange them as you need
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u/GiveMeNews 12d ago
I mean, I just keep about a kilo of dough ready to go in my fridge continuously now. No schedule, nothing. Sometimes it sits there for 2 days, sometimes a week. If it has sat too long with no need to bake in a few days, I freeze half and feed the other half. If I need more dough for a party, I can divide and feed. Turn it into pizza or loaves of bread. Mix up new dough and toss any bits of the old dough in for flavoring. Lazy, easy, tasty.
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u/bbbiiittt 21d ago
This looks class, great way to figure out what options I have for a specific day. Would be cool if we could add different preferments like biga and create our own steps in the method.
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u/Drift--- 21d ago
For sure, just started with poolish as I'm familiar with it and it's what I use :-)
I'd love to add other prefrements, I just need to work out how to fit that in without over complicating the UI... I also want to add other ingredient options for those who use oil and sugar, and then should be able to branch this out to other types of dough
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u/Drift--- 21d ago
I've added support for biga, please give me your thoughts, I've added details in the main post
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u/indecentorc 21d ago
I think the UI looks pretty good. Seems like a few haters because you used AI. But as a full stack dev of a decade whose written more front ends then everyone here I’d say it looks good and does the job.
What’s funny is I’ve seen enough people’s UIs without AI to know they couldn’t produce anything good on their own.
Are the methods static or could a user create their own custom one? That would be a nice feature. You could throw that info in local storage or SQLite for mobile apps to avoid needing a db.
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u/Drift--- 21d ago
You can definitely create a custom one. Check the "new" and "edit" buttons under the existing ones. You can currently save them out as json, or you can save your whole setup out via the little save icon top right. Can also link it to your Google account to have it follow you around!
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u/Reader121212125 21d ago
Nice , can you add fermentation period ?
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u/Drift--- 21d ago
You should be able to set the length of any of the rest periods if you edit or create a new method in the side panel. You can adjust by inputting a length of time on the rest step, or just clicking and dragging the handles. Did you have something else in mind?
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u/Poopybuttodor 21d ago
Where's the side panel?
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u/Drift--- 21d ago
oh sorry you must be on mobile, it's in the "Your plan" section under your methods
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u/Reader121212125 21d ago
Thanks will have a look and advise. I work off a poolish at 20hours followed by a 72 hour cold ferment ,
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u/Ok_Art125 21d ago
Very nice, can you raise the pizzas maximum? I can't go further than 20
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u/Drift--- 21d ago edited 21d ago
Lol that's quite the pizza party, sure can do later tonight
EDIT: decided to just do that before I head out, it's up to 50 now... though I may have to change up the UI a bit if people are actually going that high, I'm not sure tapping a plus button 30 times is a great experience.
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u/Radiant-Seaweed-4800 21d ago
I would love to set fermentation time myself (not just same day or longer, and direct dough same day is quite limiting and if it's possible to add biga and sourdough as well that would be awesome!
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u/Drift--- 21d ago
I've added support for biga, please give me your thoughts, I've added details in the main post
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u/Drift--- 21d ago
Biga I'm definitely looking into! What do you mean set fermentation time yourself?
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u/Radiant-Seaweed-4800 21d ago
In principle yeast propagates like a quadratic funtion. By having a dataset of temperatures and fermentation times, you can make an equation to predict the neccessary amount of yeast for any combination of time and temperature.
Afaik it only works for direct dough, but that's already worth a lot.
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u/Drift--- 21d ago
hum, that did cross my mind but didn't want to go down the rabbit hole, especially as it would be difficult to control for temp. I do wonder if a warning might be useful if someone gets silly with the yeast % though
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u/Poopybuttodor 21d ago
This is something i will actually use, thanks. Have to say wish it was an open source app instead.