Easy Sourdough Pizza Recipe - An Italian in my Kitchen (2024)

FAQs

How much sourdough starter to use for pizza dough? ›

The amount of sourdough starter you need to make pizza dough can vary based on the flour used and the fermentation schedule. Typically, I like to have between 10 to 20% sourdough starter in my pizza dough.

Fresh yeast and dried yeast are essentially isolated forms of yeast that have only existed for around 100 years. Before that, the only way to make pizza was to use a sourdough starter. You could argue that since pizza is older than fresh and dried yeast, sourdough pizza is actually the most authentic form of pizza!

There are many tricks to achieving a tasty, homemade pizza dough that rises into a beautiful pizza crust, such as making sure your ingredients are at right temperature, using half bread flour for a stronger dough and half all-purpose flour for a nice rise, substituting honey for sugar to help caramelize the crust and ...

Keep pressing into the dough ball to flatten it, and gently push your hands away from each other to help stretch the base outwards. Be sure to try to keep the shape as circular as possible, as this will influence the overall shape of your pizza dough base once it's stretched out.

Using high-protein white flour (13-14% protein) in your sourdough pizza dough can lead to a chewier pizza. If you'd like to reduce the chewiness, try using a lower protein flour for the pizza dough (like all-purpose flour or Type 00 with lower protein).

If you have too much starter compared to the additional flour and water you're adding, your hungry starter consumes all the nutrients and then it's not as bubbly.

Pane di Altamura and Pagnotta del Dittaino are traditional sourdough breads from Italy but are made with durum wheat flour - a hard flour as opposed to the softer variety often including some spelt used in San Francisco. Ciabatta sourdough bread is also very common and made with ordinary white bread flour.

Originating from Naples, Neapolitan pizza is perhaps the most iconic style of Italian pizza. It has a thin, soft crust that's slightly charred on the edges and a simple topping of San Marzano tomatoes, mozzarella cheese (often buffalo mozzarella), fresh basil, salt, and olive oil.

To be authentic

According to the TNPA (True Neapolitan Pizza Association), a governing body that upholds the original pizza standards, only Margherita and Marinara are acknowledged as authentic Italian pizzas (Neapolitan pizzas). The Marinara uses tomatoes oregano, extra virgin olive oil and if preferred, basil.

Cover the dough, and let it rest while you heat your oven to 450°F. For thickest crust, let your pizza rest/rise for 60 minutes before baking.

Should you roll or stretch pizza dough? ›

The best approach to achieve a light, airy crust is to stretch the dough. Yeast produces gas bubbles, which increase volume and fluffiness. Those air pockets in the dough won't disappear no matter how much you knead it. It will shuffle them about, merging smaller air pockets into larger ones.

Yes. According to AVPN International Regulations for making Verace Pizza Napoletana, it allows for 1) compressed fresh brewer's yeast, 2) dry yeast from Saccharomices cerevisiae, or 3) natural sourdough (sometimes called mother yeast or sourdough starter).

Pizza that's baked at a low temperature for an extended period will ultimately cause the dough to dry out and therefore harden. Despite the heat being set at a lower temperature, the effects are too intense.

For this no yeast pizza dough, you only need four simple ingredients (sourdough starter, water, salt, and bread flour), and the kneading time and effort are minimal. Just mix the dough, let it rise overnight, ball it up, and let it rise some more before stretching and topping.

As with any sourdough recipe, before you start baking bread, you want to make sure that your sourdough starter is as strong as possible. My basic sourdough recipe uses just 50g of starter for 500g of flour (so just 10% of starter).

Sourdough starters should be fed a minimum ratio of 1:1:1, meaning equal WEIGHTS of starter to flour to water. If you feed your starter this way and keep it at a consistently warm temperature 78ºF, your starter should peak and become active/bubbly in about 3-4 hours.

How much sourdough starter equals a packet of yeast? As a general rule, 100g of sourdough starter can be used to replace one packet of yeast (a packet usually contains 5-7g of commercial yeast).

It's as simple as feeding with flour and water. In the video I use just 15 grams of dried starter to get a new starter active and bubbling in less than 48 hours. Here's the feeding schedule I used. Step 1: Add 15 grams of dried starter, 15 grams of flour, and 30 grams of water to a jar.