Nowadays the most enjoyable challenges in my kitchen are the recipes where I replace normal yeast with a sourdough starter. This is how this Sourdough Pizza recipe came alive.
I believe that sourdough based baked goods are good for your health, easily digestible and of course, their taste is not comparable with anything else made with normal yeast.
Ingredients
Pizza dough
- 100g sourdough starter
- 800 g '00' grade flour
- 20 g salt
- 560 g water
- Some rice flour
Tomato sauce
- 1 can plum tomatoes, peeled
- 3 garlic cloves
- 1 tsp sugar
- 1 tsp salt
Toppings
- Mozarella
- Kroroneiki olive oil from Reinos de Taifas
- Rocket leaves or other fresh herbs, like basil
Instructions
Pizza dough
- Mix the starter and the water. Pour into the bowl with the other ingredients and start to mix by hand or a mixer with dough hook.
- Ferment the dough overnight in an oiled, closed plastic container (12-20 hours).
- Next day give it 20 minutes rest on your countertop.
- Divide the dough to get dough pieces based on what size of pizzas would you like to bake.
- Shape balls from the dough pieces, sprinkle them with rice flour -this way they won't stick and you can work easily with the dough later.
- Place them on a lined baking tray, cover them with a clean kitchen towel and let them rise for 2-4 hours. Make sure you keep them at room temperature. If your kitchen is too cold, place them slightly closer to a heater for example.
- When the dough is ready the dough should give a 'bounce' effect: if you slightly push the surface of the dough by your fingertip, it should bounce back.
- The dough is ready to form the pizzas. I don't like to create perfect shapes, so I put a dough ball on a lightly floured baking tray and push the air bubbles from the center of the dough pieces out to the edges while making the middle thin. This way the crust will have giant air bubbles while the middle crust will be thin under the toppings.
- Cover the pizzas with the sauce* and add the topping you would like to bake.
- Pre-heat your oven to maximum heat and bake your pizzas till you are happy with the crust edges. It takes about 10-15 minutes.
- Add some olive oil and other toppings you would like to eat fresh for example fresh herbs and premium, air dried ham.
Tomato sauce
- Crush the tomatoes by hand and strain it, to get the extra juice out of the sauce. You will need only that thick part what stays in the strainer.
- Add the spices: sugar, salt, garlic.