Pizza with a Sourdough Crust

This sourdough pizza crust is perfect for using any extra sourdough you may normally discard when refreshing your starter. The dough works for both thin crust and thick crust pizza, and you can use any toppings you like.

The dough for this sourdough pizza crust includes one cup of starter. Because this is a "mixed method" dough (meaning: you also add a bit of yeast to the dough), your starter can either be freshly fed or little-used.

Unless you maintain a sourdough starter, you're probably wondering what the heck I'm talking about, right?

A sourdough starter is a mixture of water and flour that has been allowed to ferment until it develops wild yeast. Once you've developed the wild yeast, you periodically feed your starter to keep the yeast lively and ready for baking bread.

There are lots of ways to maintain a sourdough starter. If you bake sourdough bread every day, you can keep it at room temperature, use what you need, and feed it with flour and water daily.

Like most home bakers, if you usually make sourdough bread less than once a week and keep your starter in your refrigerator, you typically need to toss out about half of the starter to make room for its next feeding.

I sometimes go a few weeks between sourdough bakes, and while my starter survives in the refrigerator, it requires two or three feedings to revive itself. If I didn't toss some of the starter, I'd end up with the sourdough blob from 1950's horror movies.

Instead of throwing the extra starter away, you can use it to make this pizza!

The rising time for this dough will vary depending on the liveliness of your starter. If the starter has been freshly fed, the dough will rise faster. If it has been a while since your starter has been fed, the dough will take longer to rise, and the sourdough tang will be stronger.

This sourdough pizza crust is par-baked prior to topping, resulting in a crust that holds up well to any sauce, cheese, meat, and veggie you choose.

For this pizza, I stretched the dough out to a 14 inch disk, and then let it rise until it was just puffy prior to par baking it.

You can top this pizza with your favorite toppings. I started with a thin layer of marinara sauce, a mixture of mozzarella and asiago cheeses, linguiça sausage, and sliced sweet onions.

By the way, I recently received this little contraption called The Baker's Bumper from the inventor of the Super Peel. It's a little inexpensive heavy duty coil that peeks up behind your baking stone to stop your pizza from sliding off the back of your stone, kind of like a backstop. I tried it with this pizza, and it worked like a charm.

Sourdough Pizza Crust Recipe

Ingredients

• 8 1/2 ounces (1 cup) 100 percent hydration sourdough starter, unfed
• 4 ounces (1/2 cup) warm water
• 10 1/2 ounces (2 1/2 cups) unbleached all purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon instant yeast
• Pizza toppings of your choice

Instructions

1. Add the starter to the bowl of a stand mixer or large bowl.
2. Add the water, flour, salt, and yeast, and mix with the dough hook, or knead by hand until smooth but still slightly sticky.
3. Place the dough into an oiled bowl, cover, and let rise until doubled. Rising time will vary depending on the liveliness of the starter. Estimated time is 2 to 4 hours.
4. Lightly spread olive oil onto a 14 inch round pizza pan or rectangular baking sheet. Flatten the dough into a disk and place it on the pan, cover with a clean towel or plastic wrap, and let it rest for 15 to 20 minutes.
5. Using your fingertips, press the dough out into a round. If the dough fights back, cover it, and let it rest for about 5 minutes. Continue to press the dough out, until you have a 14 inch round, letting the dough rest as necessary.
6. Cover the dough, and let the dough rise for about an hour or two, depending on how thick you'd like your pizza to be. Meanwhile, preheat your oven to 450 degrees F.
7. Par-bake the crust for 4 to 8 minutes, depending on how thick you want your crust. Remove the par-baked crust from the oven, and top with your preferred toppings. Continue to bake your pizza until the cheese is bubbly and golden, about 10 more minutes.
8. Remove from the oven, slice, and serve.

Yield: 1 14 inch pizza

Recipe adapted from the King Arthur Flour Baker's Catalog