Sourdough Pizza with Garden Greens

THE FARMHOUSE

I look forward to pizza night all week! You too? At our house, that means homemade pizza (no one delivers this far in the country 🤪) and while the toppings often change, our sourdough crust always stays the same. Our go-to sourdough pizza crust is light and delicious and a crowd-pleaser. So I’m sharing the recipe today along with the topping combo we made here - a vegetarian number I like to call ‘what was fresh in the garden’ - but the sky’s the limit with toppings.

psst: if you need to brush up on sourdough basics, I shared how we started our own starter, how we feed our starter, and our basic sourdough bread recipe in this post.

Sourdough pizza with garden greens - recipe on www.thegritandpolish.com

Let me let you in on a little secret - our sourdough pizza crust is just sourdough bread dough with less rise time. It’s what Chad Robertson of San Francisco’s Tartine recommends, and who am I to argue with a genius? When I make sourdough bread, I make two loaves at a time, so it’s easy to divert half of my dough (1 loaf worth) for pizzas. Each pizza is half a loaf, meaning we can eat 2 pizzas for dinner and then still have enough dough leftover to bake one loaf of bread in the morning. A win-win!

One note on timing. Like all things sourdough, some pre-planning is needed with pizza crust. This recipe takes 5+ hours to prepare and rise. And while most of that time is hands-off, you do need to be home to turn the dough. This recipe is best left for a day you’ll be at home. I usually feed my room-temp starter when I wake up and then start my dough around 11am, while the starter is still growing. That usually has us pulling pizzas out of the oven in the 5 o’clock hour, dinner time for our crew.

Today’s recipe is adapted from Chad Robertson’s basic country bread recipe in his ‘Tartine Bread’ cookbook (highly recommend!). If you need to brush up on basics for starting and maintaining a starter, check out this post as this recipe does require that you have an active starter going.

Sourdough pizza crust

makes 2 pizzas + 1 loaf of bread OR 4 pizzas

ingredients

200g fed, active starter (100% hydration starter; use starter when it’s still growing and active)

700g warm water + 50g

800g all purpose white flour

200g whole wheat bread flour

20 sea salt

Tools

kitchen scale

glass or ceramic bowl

bench knife

tea towels

pizza stone

pizza paddle or board

dutch oven (if baking a loaf of bread)

step 1

Combine starter and 700g warm water in a large bowl and mix with your hands. Once starter is dissolved, add all-purpose flour and whole wheat bread flour. Mix with your hands again until ingredients are combined. Scrape dough off your hands, cover the bowl, and let sit for 30 minutes.

Step 2

Add salt and 50g warm water to dough. Squeeze the salt between your fingers to get it mixed into the dough and then fold the dough on top of itself a few times. Transfer dough into a ceramic or glass bowl that’s big enough for the dough to rise. Cover bowl with a tea towel or beeswax wrap (I use this one).

step 3

Bulk rise. Move the dough to the kitchen counter or a proofing oven for this next step. Ideally the bread will proof at 78-82 degrees, so if your kitchen is colder than that, you can also place it by a heat vent or another warm spot in your home. Before we got a proofing oven, we used our kitchen’s electric oven with a pizza stone inside and turned it on to it’s lowest temp for a minute and then turned it back off and repeated that every 30 minutes or so. Whatever works for you.

Bulk rise will last 3-5 hours in total and during that time, the dough should be ‘turned’ every 30 minutes (ish). To do a turn, wet your hand, and reach below the bread while still in the bowl and pull the bottom of the dough up and over the top. Turn the bowl and repeat a few times until you’ve made it all the way around - 3 or 4 times in total. After each turn, cover the dough and let it continue to proof.

Knowing when bulk fermentation is done, is a bit of an art that takes time to cultivate. But in general, your dough should contain air bubbles and be smooth, elastic, and increased in volume. With every turn you’ll feel it get closer and closer to this.

step 4

Turn dough out onto a work surface sprinkled very lightly with flour. Cut the dough into two using a bench knife, and turn each piece over. Now it’s time for the initial shaping. Take the first piece of dough and with the bench knife in one hand (or just your hands), form the dough into a circle by pulling it towards you across the surface of the board. The dough will want to anchor lightly to the board, which builds tension. The dough should become taut as you pull it. Turn the dough 90-degrees and drag it across the board again. Do this a couple of times until the dough is taut and smooth and shaped in a circle. Set it aside. Repeat with the second half of the dough. Cover with a tea towel and let it sit for 20 minutes.

step 5

Place a pizza stone onto the center rack of your oven and turn it on to 500-degrees. A hot oven is key to a well-baked pizza! I like to have my oven on for about an hour before the first pizza goes in. That ensures the stone is hot and we’ll get a nice, crispy bottom crust.

step 6

Now’s the time to decide how much of your dough you want to dedicate to pizzas. Right now you have two loafs, and each loaf can make 2 pizzas. We always shape one loaf into bread (technique follows) and cut the other loaf in half and gently shape the dough again using the same technique as in step 4. Set them aside and cover with a tea towel to avoid a crust from forming.

If, like me, you’re planning to bake 1 loaf of bread in addition to the pizzas, here’s what to do with that dough.

Optional bread loaf

Any dough not being used for pizza needs to be shaped into a loaf. To do that, pick up one side of the dough and let it stretch a bit. Then fold the dough like a book, with the side you’re holding going into the middle and then the opposite side going into the middle. Turn the dough 90-degrees, pick one side up and fold it like a book again. Roll the dough away from you, keeping it tight, until the seam side is down.

Sprinkle the top with flour (rice flour is best if you have it) and let it sit while you prepare your proofing container. I use a bowl with a tea towel to do the final proof and sprinkle the towel with flour (again, rice flour is better than AP). Pick up the folded loaf and gently turn it upside down as you place it in the bowl. The folds should now be face up. Wrap the towel edges over the top of the dough and place the bowl in the fridge for 12 hours.

When you’re ready to cook, heat the oven to 500-degrees and place a dutch oven inside to warm. Remove dough from fridge and let it warm up to room temp. Reduce the oven to 450, and pull out the dutch oven. Place the dough inside the dutch oven with seam-side down, and then score the top. Cook for 20 minutes with the lid on and 25 minutes with the lid off, 45 minutes in total.

Step 7

Form the crust. Once your oven is warming and your toppings are ready (see below for the ‘garden greens’ toppings we used here), pick up one pizza crust. Leave any dough you’re not using yet under a tea towel. Hand form the crust by lifting it on the backs of your floured hands and spreading gently. Pinch together any holes that form. Transfer pizza to a floured pizza paddle or board (we use a combination of oat and rice flour to flour our paddle). Add toppings.

psst: our ‘garden greens’ ingredients list is below.

Sourdough pizza crust with garden greens - recipe on www.thegritandpolish.com

Step 8

Cook until crust is golden brown and the entire pizza lifts up when a knife is slid underneath and lifted. About 12 minutes.

We’ve experimented with tons of topping combos. Basically we just look in our fridge, pantry, and garden and dream up that night’s pizza. And of course, we take note of what the kids are eating and what they’re getting sick of (like mozzarella 🤷🏼‍♀️) and work around that. With the perennial herbs in full swing and our annual greens starting to produce, we opted for a fresh garden greens pizza on this night. The second pizza, not shown, had less greens on it for the kids and we served it with a side of tomato sauce for dipping.

Garden Greens Pizza Toppings

ingredients

garlic

fresh herbs (we used chives, oregano, and thyme)

olive oil

sea salt

fresh greens (we used kale, Swiss chard, and arugula)

parmesean cheese

Finely chop herbs and garlic and place in a small bowl with olive oil and about 1/2tsp of salt. Brush herbed oil over pizza and top with greens, reserving some of the arugula. Lightly sprinkle pizza with salt. Cook pizza as instructed in step 8. Remove from oven and add additional arugula and chive blossoms and grate parmesan cheese over top.