My friend Stefania makes sourdough bread all the time. She makes all kinds – hamburger buns, bagels, tortillas, pizza, and that’s just what I know she’s mentioned. When I told her about this blog, she said that we should cook together. She’s probably going to be moving soon, so I finally got my act together to email her back to figure out a time when we could cook. I had lots of time during Memorial Day weekend, so we devised a plan to make sourdough pizzas.
We used the recipe below, adapted from the Sourdough Pizza recipe from Sourdough Home.
Sourdough Pizza
1.5 cups flour
1.5 cups starter (100% hydration)
1 tsp. salt
1 tbsp. olive oil
We didn’t have enough starter, so we used about 1 cup of starter and added a half cup of water to make up the difference. We all took turns kneading the dough. It seemed to take a long time for the dough to become elastic and smooth enough to let it rest. If I had to guess, I’d say it was kneaded for about 20 minutes (based on how long it took me to knead some sourdough I made later – I wasn’t timing it for the pizzas). We then let it rest while we got the rest of the ingredients together. After 30 minutes, Stefania rolled out the dough, and we began topping pizzas.
For toppings, we had: zucchini, asparagus, eggplant, portabella mushrooms, bacon, and Gouda and mozzarella cheeses. We made a sauce from a 28oz can of tomatoes (that had some spices added, I think), half an onion, a stalk or two of celery, and a carrot or two.
Stefania rolled the pizzas very thin, so I think we got about 8 or so pizzas out of this before we ran out of toppings. I would say that they were about 10-inch in diameter. We baked them at 450F for… 8-10 minutes? Honestly, this was 2 weeks ago, so I can’t remember the timing.
These had a good flavor from the sourdough. They baked up pretty well, too. These only needed a little swirl of sauce, and you didn’t want to overload them with toppings. The edges baked up very nice and crispy. Stefania did most of the work on this, doing the majority of the kneading and rolling out the dough, and she did a fantastic job.
Stefania gave me a little starter from this, so I’ll probably try the pizzas again in the future. I may try making them a little thicker, and pre-baking them to have a thicker, chewier crust.
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