People say you can't beat a good sourdough pizza. Until now I've made the workhorse loaf from seriouseats and made enough dough for a loaf and a few pizzas. Since I mastered sourdough I decided to try the same approach and I'm getting great results from the loaf but the pizzas are a bit flat. I create a ferment for 12 hours overnight then add my flour, water and salt, kneading until silky smooth and then leaving for 5 hours at 23C, performing 4 folds at hourly intervals. After the 5 hours, I divide the dough up to create a boule for my loaf that I rise in a banettone for 90 mins before baking. The rest of the dough gets divided up and rolled out into 3 pizzas that are then left in floured tea towels to rise for an hour or two. I bake them for a few mins to stop them soaking up the juice from the topping, top them and bake them. I have baked them at a very high temp, but the toppings cook too fast for the base. I then baked at 200C for longer, expecting it to give the bases time to cook and, crucially, rise. Instead we just get an incredibly hard crust and a base like cardboard that hasn't risen.
I can almost tell something is going to go wrong because when I get the bases out of the oven to top them they have a kind of translucent appearance that just looks wrong
So, the question is, have I left it too late in the process to roll out the dough; should I not have rolled at all, stretched instead?; should I have cooked for longer before topping????? Or something else???
I was so pleased to have mastered the loaves after a few dubious (would've made a good weapon) results and I'd love to master sourdough pizzas so any advice would be much appreciated.
Gareth
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