There are bazillion ways of preparing a pizza dough, from the super quick dough using big amounts of yeast to the long and cold retarded fermentation dough, with or without preferment (biga, poolish)... all of them are valid. Of course it's a matter of preference and personal taste, but the long fermented doughs will bring some benefits like better digestibility, more fragrant and tasty.
What if we go beyond and try do make a formula for sourdough? Most people would say: ah nooo! That's too sour and acid... we don't like for pizza. Those are valid points, but what if we make a perfect pizza dough without that sourness that is mistakenly given to sourdough bread? What if we combine the experience of baking sourdough bread and apply the same techniques to pizza dough? The result would be a similar pizza dough than a long fermented one using small amounts of yeast, but with a little punch that would make the dough even more delicious.
This recipe is made for 2 dough balls of ~260g. You can change the quantities accordingly.
Since we don't want an acid dough, we will start preparing our sourdough starter at 1:5:5 ratio.
Preferment 1: Mix 15g of your active starter with 80g flour and 80g water. Wait until it rises and doubles in size, it might take a couple of hours. A good practice is to leave it fermenting overnight.
This part is key, as we are using only 1/5 part of starter to make sure we don't give much time to natural yeasts to produce alcoholic fermentation. In the contrary, if you are looking for a sour pizza dough, you can leave this resting the whole day.
Preferment 1: Take the previous preferment and mix it again with 80g water and 80g flour. Let's give those microorganism some more food to make them very strong. Leave it rest for 3-5 hours depending on the room temperature.
Once the previous preferment is on its peak, mix it together with the following ingredients :
- 290g flour
- 130g water
- 10g salt
- 12g olive oil (optional *)
The recommendation is to mix or "dissolve" the preferment with the water and then slowly add the flour and finally the salt.
* NOTE: if you are going to use a regular electric oven, it's recommended to use olive oil to get more crunchy crust. You can skip it if you use a gas pizza oven.
Then you can knead the dough using any technique (slap and fold, ...) or use a dough machine. You can give it some short rest periods of 5-10 minutes and continue kneading till getting a smooth dough ball. That will mean that the gluten is well developed.
Leave it rest for 1 hour and divide the dough into 2 balls. Those will be our pizza balls that we will stretch once they are well proofed.
Leave the balls resting at room temperature 1 hour (2 hours if it's cold) and place them in the fridge at least 24 hours. You can leave them in cold retard for 2-3 days but...
IMPORTANT!!: Make sure the fridge temperature is ~4ºC (39F) or 5ºC(41F) maximum, otherwise it will overproof and you will have serious problems to stretch them later on.
If you are not going to use the dough for some days, you can put them in the freezer at this point, before the long fermentation at room temperature. When you want to use them, just let them defrost in the fridge for 1 day or so, but NEVER at room temperature.
You can't stretch cold doughs, otherwise they would be very stiff and would end up breaking. Therefore, you should take them out of the fridge at least 1 hour before preparing your pizzas, but not longer to prevent overproofing.
Enjoy the taste of sourdough pizza. You might not get the same super puffy Neapolitan cornicione than using only yeast method, but if you have followed the steps correctly, there won't be much difference, and you'll get a delicious pizza where you might remove all the toppings just to enjoy the sourdough :p
About the author
Jose Lausuch, engineer, father, guitar player and sourdough enthusiast... Ah! And also a fan of TheBreadCode :D
Follow me on IG @bake_with_jose