Sourdough pizza crust recipe review with pictures

Who doesn't love pizza? It is on the top of my list of favorite foods. Unfortunately, ordering pizza is expensive, and frozen pizzas are often loaded with calories and sodium. That leaves me making homemade pizza on a pretty regular basis.

Normally I use the can of Pillsbury pizza dough they sell next to the biscuits. It is good, but it usually gives you a fairly thin crust without a lot of flavor. I prefer my crust to be a little thicker and fluffier, so this week I decided to make my own. I happen to have a batch of sourdough starter living in my refrigerator, so that is where my quest for a sourdough pizza dough recipe began.

The orignal recipe for this pizza came from sourdoughhome.com. Here is the link http://www.sourdoughhome.com/pizzacrusts.html.

Was it easy?

I would say this recipe was easy to medium difficulty. If you are already proficient at making dough and bread, it should be a snap. If those particular skills don't come easily to you than it might be a little more difficult.

Was it good?

Yes, I thought the end result was very good. It turned out fluffy and tender - just what I was looking for. Now, my particular pizza was not very pretty. I always have trouble getting dough to do what I want though, so yours will probably come out much better looking!

One of the reasons I chose to make this particular recipe was its very short and easy list of ingredients. In fact, it only has four - starter, olive oil, salt, and flour. I adhered to the original recipe as far as measurements go.

I have had my sourdough starter going for a few weeks now. It is alive and well in my refrigerator. Every time you use it you have to feed it, so it continues to grow and mature in flavor. If you don't have sourdough starter already, you can easily find several good recipes online. My starter happens to come from this recipe http://www.cdkitchen.com/recipes/recs/398/Texas_Sweet_Sourdough_Bread48700.shtml. It makes excellent sourdough bread which I write a hub for the next time I make it.

As you can see, my starter is quite watery. Some starters are more doughy. You will have to judge how much flour to add to this recipe based on the consistency of your starter. I started with the amount the recipe called for, but this made a very lose dough. I later added another full cup of flour and probably should have used even more.

Once you've got all your ingredients together, mix them up in a big bowl. Yep, it's that easy. The original recipe says that you should knead the dough and then let it sit for half an hour before rolling it out. Those were my intentions, but life got in the way. Here is what happened instead...

I was in the process of making the dough when my husband informed me he wanted to go out for lunch. "No big deal", I thought. "I'll just put it in the fridge for dinner." That is what I did. I mixed all the ingredients up, covered it with plastic wrap and stuck it in the refrigerator.

I fully intended to come home and cook my pizza dough for dinner. I really did. Life, however, got in the way again. This dough stayed in the refrigerator for the rest of the day. Before bed, I took it out and set it on the counter to let it rise overnight. The original recipe says that it does not need to rise at all. I figured I might as well let it rise though if I was going to let it rest all this time anyway.

The next morning, the dough had risen quite a bit. I turned it out on the counter to knead it, and ended up adding at least an extra cup of flour. I would have (and should have) added more, but I was out. I kneaded it for a few minutes, but it was a very messy process.

After I was done, I plopped my dough onto my pan and spread it out into a semi pizza shape. If you have enough flour, you should be able to roll your dough out into a normal looking pizza.

I let the dough rest in this shape for about 30 minutes. It puffed up a little bit more in that time and would have gotten even bigger if I had left it longer. I was hungry though.

Once the dough had rested, I sprinkled an Italian seasoning blend of spices and some parmesan cheese around the edges for extra flavor. Then I pre-baked it in a 450 degree oven for 7 minutes. The purpose of that is just to let the crust have some extra time to bake, not to get it all the way done.

I took it out of the oven and topped it with store bought tomato sauce, shredded cheese, and pepperoni. It may not be the fanciest pizza, but it is my favorite. I put that back in the oven for another 13 minutes until the cheese was bubbley and the crust was starting to brown.

I'll admit, I was a little worried about this pizza. It looked like it might be too dense. The sourdough smell coming from the uncooked dough was very strong. It turned out, my fears were unfounded though. This pizza was great! The crust was crisp on the outside, light and airy on the inside. It had a good flavor that was neither bland nor pungent. I definitely recommend this recipe to anyone looking to make sourdough pizza crust. I will be making it again!