Pizza Dough With Sourdough
So, I have a very important question for you all who I’m sure must be more experienced than me in the subject. I have been working as a Pizza Chef for a couple of years now, using mainly wooden fired ovens, even though I also been making pastas, burgers deserts and other dishes, my main passion has definitely been working with dough and making the pizzas from scratch.
Now I’ve been invited to start a new challenge in a new place with an electric oven, and in the meantime I’m actually creating a sourdough starter so my plan was to make the pizzas for this place, incorporating my sourdough starter in the original Pizza recipe I have, in which it is made with Baker’s Yeast instead.
Have you guys got any advice/recipe that would work for a nice pizza crust? Can I mix both sourdough and baker’s yeast for a more time efficient dough?
Thanks in advance
Tony Gemignani's excellent high-end book "The Pizza Bible" goes into pizza dough made with a combo of sourdough and commercial yeast.
And, the Kindle edition is currently, as of July 19, 2021, on sale for $4.99, normally $9.99 and the Kindle list price is $14.99.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00JYWW490
See my write-up and a link to his videos here: https://www.thefreshloaf.com/comment/490098#comment-490098
I have both the Kindle edition and a hard copy. Because you are a pizza pro, you need this book.
Thanks for the tip. I just downloaded the kindle version from Amazon Australia - $5.99 AUD.
Many thanks for that.
You can definitely do a hybrid sourdough pizza crust combining the flavour of a levain but spiked with a tiny amount of IDY to have it rise more efficiently. You could start by adding 0.1% IDY to your sourdough pizza recipe and then adjust up or down from there.
I've made purely sourdough pizza (Neapolitan-style) following the formula by Maurizio on theperfectloaf.com. Often I didn't follow the process exactly, but matched the overall formula (e.g. added much less starter and bulked longer/warmer), and every time the crust has been excellent. I have tried adding some diastatic malt powder too (0.5%), since my flour is not malted, and it speeds up browning just a little I think. I bake on steel with the grill/broiler on, the bottom crust cooks very nicely just in time when the top browns.
And of course no problems adding some commercial yeast, although I haven't tried that. I don't know about your setup, but I struggle to imagine any need to add CY though: good pizza dough takes a long time to ferment anyway, and sourdough has no problems rising it very nicely.