Sourdough Pizza Crust

This recipe uses basic ingredients for a sourdough pizza crust that is full of flavor and can be made ahead of time.

If you have been baking with sourdough for any length of time, you know that discarding your starter is a necessary evil. If you don’t do it, it will overflow the container and also starts to lose its vigor. But it feels so wrong! You are a baker, you are thrifty, you don’t like to waste things. Alas, it must be done. The solution is find recipes that use discard starter. Here’s one you’ll like. (And here’s another that’s totally different.)

When you love baking and love pizza, a sourdough pizza crust is a natural fit.

Step by step pizza dough making

This is a simple recipe. We begin by combining all the ingredients in a large mixing bowl. Don’t worry about the order. In they go. Stir with a wooden spoon. Sometimes the dough will seem too dry and crumbly, like it will not come together.:

If this happens, add water a teaspoon at a time and mix the dough until a somewhat shaggy ball has formed:

Once you have achieved the right hydration level for your dough, simply cover it with a clean tea towel and let it rest on the counter for 30 minutes. This makes sure all the flour gets combined with the water.

After this brief rest, its time to knead. This dough only needs a short knead, so I do it by hand. A stand mixer would also work well for this. (Read this if you need tips on kneading with your stand mixer.)

You know you have sufficiently kneaded when the dough goes from sticky to smooth.

Once you are done kneading, shape into a dough ball and place the dough into a clean, lightly oiled bowl and cover tightly with plastic wrap.

The dough rises at room temperature for three to four hours or overnight in the fridge. It will double in size, and look like this:

Divide into thirds, or whatever size you need for your pizzas. Shape into a rough disk on a floured surface and let them come to room temperature before stretching them out into a thin crust.

Baking pizzas with this dough

You can use whatever recipe you want to bake your final product. If you want (ahem) the best pizza recipe, I have one for New York style pizza.

Optional ingredients for sourdough pizza crust

• The most “authentic” pizza dough is made with Italian 00 flour. It has a very fine texture and can be subbed 1:1 for bread flour in this recipe. I can’t always find it at the store and it is expensive, but I do like to use it when I have it on hand.
• To help the crust brown even more in the oven, you can replace 1/2 tablespoon of the sugar with diastatic malt powder. For these pictures I just used sugar to show the color of the crust, but diastatic malt powder is a great product for sourdough bakers to have. The dough will rise a bit more and brown faster.

Here’s the video and the recipe:

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Happy baking!