Sourdough Pizza Dough

Yay! Now that we've finally woken up our starter (see last post), we can make some tasty breads! Let's start easy. Pizza! I love it. I could have it every day. Once I actually had it for five consecutive meals, and no, that's not an exaggeration!

The reason pizza dough is so easy is because it only has one rise. Most breads go through two rises, or proofs: once after they are just mixed up, and then another after they have been shaped into whatever form you plan to bake them. Pizza dough, however, just has the one initial rise, then is rolled out, topped, and baked. Here's my recipe:

1 1/2 cups starter

3 tablespoons warm water

1 tablespoon sugar

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 - 1 1/2 cups bread flour

1 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

Mix your newly fed starter with the warm water, sugar, olive oil, and 1/2 cup of the flour, adding the salt halfway through the mixing process (it creates a "buffer" so the salt doesn't kill the starter). Keep adding flour gradually until the dough comes together and you can work it with your hands.

Turn out onto a well-floured surface.

Knead the dough until it becomes smooth and elastic, adding flour as you go if it becomes too sticky. The length of time to knead the dough will depend on how aggressive you are! What you're doing is building up the gluten strands, making a sort of webbing that creates the structure of the dough. Really work the dough, smooshing it, rolling it around, pressing it with the heels of your palms, etc. It will start to come together and look like this:

Round it out and place it in a bowl that has been oiled with olive oil. Smear a little olive oil over the top of the dough to keep it from drying out.

See the webbing that has formed now?

If you plan to make pizza immediately, cover the bowl with plastic wrap, place it in a warm location, and wait until doubled in size. Then you can roll it out and top it. I like to make the dough on my days off and keep it in my fridge, covered in plastic wrap, and then use it for an easy dinner after work. I've kept pizza dough in my fridge for two weeks before using it, and it's great! Just take it out before work to warm up and proof, and it's ready to use when you get home. Here's the newly made dough sitting next to my leftover starter from the the feeding.

Bake the pizza dough at the highest temperature your oven will go; usually somewhere around 500 degrees. If you have a pizza stone, they're fantastic for getting a great crispy crust. If you have difficulty getting a topped pizza onto your pizza stone, par-bake (partially bake) your crust until it's set, take it out and top it on the back of a cookie sheet, and slide it back onto your stone to fully bake.

Happy baking!

Sourdough Part 2: Feeding and caring for your starter

Okay, remember Jack, my starter, from my last post? Let's wake him up.

When feeding your starter you want to add equal parts bread flour and warm water to add up to the total weight of the starter. In my case when I scooped Jack out of his jar into a large bowl, he weighed 11 ounces.




I simply stirred in 5.5 ounces of bread flour and 5.5 ounces of warm water. Be careful the water isn't too warm; it can kill a starter. Remember, it's alive! Be nice to it! I usually use the same wrist test you would use to check a baby bottle or bath. No worries if it's too cool; it may just take longer to activate your starter. That's it! Now I leave him alone to wake up, grow, and begin bubbling. Below is a photo I took after only five minutes:

Looks a bit like pancake batter, smells a little funky, and tiny bubbles have already started to rise to the top. I covered the bowl with plastic wrap and left it on my butcher block table in the kitchen. Came back ten hours later and Jack looks like this now:

Lots of new little air bubbles! But he's not quite ready yet. 16 hours later and now Jack looks ready:

Doubled in size, covered in air bubbles, and ready to use! At this point you take out however much starter you need for your recipe and return the rest to a jar for the fridge but DON'T SEAL THE JAR. There are still gases escaping and could blow the lid. Just set the lid on top and screw it down after a day or two. If you don't bake very often but want to make sure your starter stays alive and well, simply throw out the extra starter you won't need; you'll have to feed it again soon anyway!

My starter took 16 hours to reach the ready-to-use point. Yours will be different, depending on the age and activity of the yeast. It also depends on the weather. It was about 65-70 degrees in my house where Jack was sitting, so if it's in the heat of the day in August your starter will obviously move faster. Plan to feed your starter 24 hours before you plan to bake; then you're sure to be ready!

As far as frequency of feeding goes, that will depend on you. Commercial bakeries feed their starters at least once every day and have the strongest ones out there. But I've forgotten about starters in the back of my fridge for up to a month or longer and they have revived just fine, though they took quite a while to wake up and then proof later. Simply put: more feedings make for stronger starters.

Next up: bread baking! Actually we'll start out easy and fun with sourdough pizza dough.

Happy feeding!

NOTES regarding equipment and ingredients:

*I have heard many times that metal bowls will react with your starter if you leave them to ferment. I've even heard it taken so far to say you shouldn't use any metal object to stir the starter with. Now, I've used all kinds of utensils and had no ill effects, but I've never left my starter to ferment in anything other than a glass bowl. I figure I have one; why take the chance?


*Bread flour is different from All Purpose flour in that you will get a much better bread product due to the higher gluten content. It makes for a more structured, chewy bread with a great crust, whereas cake flour, pastry flour, and AP flour (a mixture of pastry and bread) are lower in gluten and provides that necessary softness for cakes and pastries. If you plan on baking bread you really should get bread flour. Most grocery stores carry it now, and it's not any more expensive than AP flour.

Sourdough Part 1: a primer, aka, your starter

Everyone? I would like you to meet Jack. This is Jack, in the photo above. He's my sourdough starter. I'll get to why he has a name in a minute; first let's talk about sourdough for a bit.

What makes sourdough so, well, amazing? Why is it sour? And what in the world is a "starter?" I'm sure if you're following a cooking blog you've heard the word "starter" before, even if you don't know what it is. The basic concept is this: all bread products needs a levening agent in order to rise. It can be chemical (baking soda, baking powder, etc.), mechanical (whipping something into a frenzy to incorporate air), or biological. In most cases, biological leveners are yeasts.

Yeast is a naturally occuring organism in the air. When yeast is added to bread it will eat sugars in the dough and release CO2 gases, which makes the dough bubble and rise. The yeast dies during the baking process but leaves its lovely air bubbles throughout our breads, making them light and fluffy.

Most people are familiar with the yeast that comes dry and in little yellow packets from the grocery store. This is dried, dormant yeast, but once you add sugar, moisture, and heat, these little guys come to life and do their CO2 magic. But how does that differ from a starter?

A starter is a LIVE yeast that is cultivated and kept alive through regular feedings. Every couple of weeks or so I pull Jack out of the fridge, feed him some fresh bread flour and warm water, and watch him grow and multiply. Then I take out what I need for a recipe and put the rest back in his jar and put him back in the fridge.

And THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is what is meant when you hear a starter is 75, 100, or 150 years old. That starter began by catching live yeast cultures from the air and feeding and caring and using it for that many years. That is what makes sourdough sour. The older the starter, the more flavor. You'll also hear a sourdough starter refered to as "the mother" since all bread comes from it. That's also why sourdough breads can taste so different based on where they were created. Different areas have different yeasts.

Jack is a very, very, VERY young starter, but I'm attached to him. When I was in culinary school our chef instructor created Jack especially for us in September 2009 and named him Jack, after his fat cat. Chef said if you name your starter you're more likely to feed it, rather than neglect it in the back of your fridge. Jack isn't very sour yet, or even very strong, but he still makes yummy bread, and has even already "spawned" some offspring when my mom took some of Jack to keep her own starter!

The next entry will be all about how to feed your starter and keep it alive. If you're interested in getting your own sourdough starter there are hundreds of websites available. They'll simply ship you a little packet with a dried out starter (similar to those little packets at the grocery store) with instructions on how to reconstitute it. You can also create your very own personal starter at home with nothing more than a bowl of flour and water, and a little time. There are also lots of instructions online to teach you how to catch native yeasts.

I hope you guys will enjoy this new series of posts! I'm looking forward to sharing my results with you.