Well, yeast seems pretty hard to come by these days, so we’ve been playing around with sourdough, which uses wild yeast that you cultivate yourself! After making quite a few sourdough loaves (and learning a lot about how wild yeast behaves compared to commercial yeast), we decided to play around and make a pizza crust from it! If you don’t have a sourdough starter already sitting in your fridge all ready to go, it’s well worth it to make one…but it will add a good 5 days to your crust process, so plan accordingly! Fear not though…it’s rather easy, and your patience will be rewarded!
We used this crust as the base for our Bacon Mushroom Gruyere Pizza. That said, we think it would go very well with the flavours from our Appenzeller Schinken Pizza and/or Bratwurst Pizza with Kohlrabi Sauce recipes.
Time: 9 Hours (Sourdough requires a long rise)
Ingredients:
- 1/4 Cup of (refreshed) Sourdough Starter (We suggest heading over to Youtube for information on how to make your own fresh sourdough starter).
- 1.5 Cups All Purpose Flour
- 3/4 Cup of Warm Water
- 1 Teaspoon Salt
Method:
- Put your refreshed sourdough starter into the bowl of your stand mixer, and then add in your other ingredients.
- If you’ve got a refrigerated sourdough starter, refresh it by putting 1/4 cup of your starter into the bowl of your stand mixer, and then add in 1/4 cup of warm water and 1/4 cup of flour, cover with plastic cling wrap, and let sit overnight on the counter.
- Then, the next day, add 5/4 cup flour and 1/2 cup warm water and your salt to the mix, and proceed to the next step.
- Mix and knead with your dough hook attachment for about 8-10 minutes to develop the gluten structure.
- Give a large glass bowl a little oil spray, form your dough into a ball, add it to your oiled bowl, and top it with plastic wrap. Set aside, and let it proof (aka sit on your counter untouched) for about 8 hours.
- Towards the end of your proofing time, place your pizza stone in the oven, and heat it to 425 degrees F.
- When your pizza stone is hot, remove it from the oven, sprinkle some corn meal on top of it.
- Lightly flour your hands, remove and shape your dough, and place it on your pizza stone. We generally like to turn our dough into a thick round disc and then use a French rolling pin to roll it into shape.
- Poke little fork holes in the dough to avoid large air pockets.
- Bake for about 5 minutes until your dough starts to brown ever so slightly.
- At this point, you’re ready to add your desired pizza toppings and bake for 20-25 minutes until your crust reaches your optimal level of crispiness.
- Plate, devour, and enjoy!
