If you’re reading this, you probably don’t need us to sing the merits of making sourdough bread from scratch. Fresh baked bread from the oven whenever you want it, the comforting routine of kneading and shaping your dough, and a little refrigerator friend for you to love and nourish in the form of your sourdough starter. Sourdough starter, the live leavener you’ll need for your bread to rise, requires a bit of maintenance. Before you feed it with fresh flour and water, you need to discard several grams. But that discard is still viable for baking and, even better, it’s still delicious to eat.
There are actually quite a few recipes you can make with your sourdough starter discard: crackers, bread sticks, cinnamon rolls, even pancakes. But one of the best possible answers to any question, especially when it comes to deliciously chewy and flavorful bread, is pizza. Yes, you can make a super tasty pizza crust with the sourdough discard you’d hate to throw away. Rather than solely relying on yeast as with classic pizza dough, you can use your starter discard to leaven your dough. You’ll still achieve the crisp, golden brown crust you know and love, but your pizza dough will have that fermented depth of flavor and a marvelously chewy texture.
How to use sourdough starter discard in your pizza dough
There are two distinct paths to create a tasty pizza crust with sourdough starter. You can either speed up the process by boosting your starter and dough with an additional packet of instant yeast, or you can let time do the leavening work instead. Though even two or three hours will give you perfectly satisfying pizza, if you can afford to spare several hours, consider mixing up your dough the night before and letting it ferment on the counter overnight. The next morning, you’ll have to give it a little stretch and a fold before covering it and placing it in the fridge. About an hour before you’d like your pizzas to go in the oven, take out the dough and let it rest for 30 minutes before shaping it into ball-sized portions and letting it rest again.
With either version of sourdough discard-based pizza, you should avoid using a rolling pin to eventually shape your dough into a circle. You’ll press out all the pockets of air and make your dough too dense and hard to chew through. Once shaped and dressed with toppings, you can either cook your pizza on a sheet pan or pizza stone (to avoid a soggy crust) in a super hot oven or cast iron skillet under the broiler, which is key to making restaurant-style pizza at home. Whichever method you choose, make sure to preheat your pan or skillet so that the bottom crust has a chance to crisp up. Once you taste the tender, tangy results, you may never go back to your old pizza crust recipe again.
