The Fresh Loaf

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Sourdough Pizza

ohc5e's picture
ohc5e

Sourdough Pizza

On Thursday of last week, I made pizza dough using my 100% hydration sourdough starter. I let it ferment at room temperature for a few hours before putting it in the fridge for 3 days to ferment.  After the long wait, I am happy to say the pizza turned out great.  I found a great site on the web for pizza dough run by a serious home pizza-maker.  Its got a lot of great information about Neapolitan style pizza, not all of which I followed. (i.e. I ignored the advice to cut off the door lock of my oven so that I could use the self-clean function to bake my pizzas at 700 degrees--I guess I just don't have enough commitment to the home-pizza making cause!).  I heated my pizza stone for an hour at 550 and used my broiler on high to cook the pizzas, which were cooked in roughly three and half minutes.  The crust was chewy and soft in the middle with a crispy, lightly charred outer crust.  The sauce was made from imported San Marzano tomatoes that I pureed with an immersion blender, two gloves of smashed, raw garlic, and a handful of torn fresh basil.  I used mozzarella that I bought today at a great Italian specialty store in Brooklyn (Caputo Fine Foods) that makes the mozzarella fresh every morning and salts it in a brine right in front of you--amazing.  I'm sure the pizza would have been almost the same using some good, fresh mozzarella from the grocery store but this was especially good .  I added a couple of tablespoons of fresh grated parmigiano cheese and when the pies came out, a healthy dose of olive oil.  I'm stuffed and can definitely say the pizza was worth the wait.  The link to Jeff Varasano's pizza site is http://slice.seriouseats.com/jvpizza/  He gives very detailed instructions on kneading, etc that makes for an interesting read...

The dough was really wet compared to most pizza doughs I've made before which resulted in a failed first effort at stretching the dough.  But I did much better on my next try and by the third and fourth, I had the process down.  I just had to turn the dough much faster than I'm used to. I used a mixture of KA bread flour and imported Molino Caputo Tipo 00 pizza flour from Italy.  I used roughly three-quarters "00" and one-quarter KA bread flour, if I remember correctly.  The finely milled flour has a gluten percentage of about 11.5%.  I'm interested to try it in a ciabatta recipe.  You can buy it from www.fornobravo.com.  Shipping was pretty reasonable considering.  I bought 5, 2.2lb bags for about $30, including shipping.  

Hot PizzaShot of the CrumbShot of the Crumb

Underside of the PizzaUnderside of the Pizza 

Comments

Floydm's picture
Floydm

Looks good.

I do 550 too.

cnlindon's picture
cnlindon

Looks very good...I have always wanted to try sour dough pizza, but haven't yet.

scootergfast's picture
scootergfast

I do a two crust Skillet creation that is real popular and if I could figure out these picture uploads I will post some but that crust was beautiful and how was the chew of the crust?   

Glorious Cooking and Baking to All

Scooter G Fast

JMonkey's picture
JMonkey

Yum.