Ultimate Sourdough Pizza bases and Sourdough Boule

Tradition Rebooted...

As explained on my sourdough starter recipe here, sourdough was the original way of leavening bread before commercial yeast was available. However due to the lovely complexity of flavour it adds to your bread, it has become a very popular trend once again.

So let me show you how you use the natural yeast and bacteria to make the most amazing pizza base you will ever try plus a nice crusty boule.

P.S - Due to the lockdown, the house is a little cramped right now so the photos will just be from my phone... apologies, I will upload nice ones at some point in the future!

• Makes 3 individual pizzas and 1 medium size boule.

• Prep - 6.5 hours (mostly waiting, only about half an hour of work) 

• Cooking - 30 mins

Let's Get The Ingredients...

• 800g Strong White Bread Flour (Plus plenty for dusting)
• 2 Teaspoons Salt
• 320g Active Sourdough Starter (You can use your own, or use my super one here)
• 460ml Water (Lukewarm)
• Pizza Sauce (recipe coming soon!)
• Toppings of your choice

Now To Cook...

Firstly, start by putting the flour into a large mixing bowl and add the salt on top. Stir the salt through the flour with your hand roughly.

Now add the water and the sourdough starter and start mixing together into a paste.

Once it is kind of combined, tip out onto a floured clean surface and start to knead. You want to use the ball of your hand to stretch the dough away from you and then hook it back over and repeat.

There is no set time that you need to do this for, it depends on your strength and how you are working it and can vary from time to time.

You will find during this that the dough becomes sticky and you will want to add more flour... DON'T!!

Trust the dough... its sticky now because the gluten that's forming hasn't been worked into strands... keep working with that sticky dough and you will find the more you work it, the less sticky it actually becomes.

when it starts to look smooth and silky you will need to do the windowpane test to see if the dough is ready. cut a large piece of dough off and start to stretch it out whilst holding it up... you should be able to see the light coming through it but it should not tear at this stage... if it starts to tear, or looks lumpy, it is not ready and you need to knead it more.

I couldn't get a picture of this as I only have two hands and it is only me working on this blog so I found a good picture of what you are looking for when doing the test courtesy of Apartment Therapy here:

Once the dough is ready, oil a large bowl slightly and then put the dough into the bowl and cover in plastic wrap or cling film. Leave at from temperature for 3 hours or until it has doubled in size.

This is longer than normal bread proving stages as the sourdough need a little longer to do its thing but it is totally worth it, I promise!

If your house is warm and its doubled in size in less time, then that is ok, as long as its nice and risen you can go ahead and continue. Likewise, if after 3 hours it's still not doubled yet, feel free to leave it a little longer. 

Once it is now doubled in size, flour the surface again and oil your hands a little. turn the dough on the floured surface and start knocking the dough back but folding it in half, rotating and repeating. do this maybe 5 or 6 times and then split the dough into two halves. 

Take one half for the boule and lift this dough in your hands and carefully turn it around 90 degrees at a time keeping the top upwards and pulling the sides down and tucking underneath to make a nice dome shape and place on the floured cooking surface you are using.

Place this ball of dough into a floured proving basket upside down and cover. If you don't have a proving basket, you can use a dutch oven or large pyrex dish with lid. make sure you line it with a clean linen or tea towel and flour well.

With the remaining half of the dough, split this into 3 pieces and follow the same shaping technique above but to make 3 little balls of dough. Place the balls onto a well-floured tray and cover in cling film.

You now need to let these both prove for 3 hours again, like before, unless you wish to use it the next day instead.

Now with this being sourdough, you can store this in the fridge for a couple of days quite happily until you are ready to use it as long as you prove it for 3 hours one you take it out of the fridge.

Once done, you want to get your oven really hot. As hot as your oven will go (really!). If you are not using a dutch oven you will want an empty roasting tray at the bottom of the oven heating too.

With the boule, you want to turn the basket upside down onto a floured baking tray and score the top with a razor blade and then pop it into the oven. Now add some boiling water to the preheated tray you left at the bottom of the oven to release steam into it. and bake like this for 30-35 minutes.

If you are using a dutch oven however you just want to tip it upside down with the lid on, remove the bottom and then the towel or linen. Score the bread and replace the top of the dish and pop in the oven for 25 minutes. After this 25 minutes, remove the top of the oven and bake for another 20 minutes.

Let the boule cool on a wire rack before slicing into it.

Now, for the pizza, put in a pizza stone into the oven, or roasting tray upside down if you don't have one. Let this preheat and then take your balls of dough and place onto the floured surface... you want to gently push into the middle of the ball with your fingers and start to push all the air to the edges of the ball whilst slowing flattening it. If you find the dough is springing back, leave it for 10 minutes. and come back to it. the gluten will have relaxed and you can continue.

Now flour a chopping board well and then carefully pick up one of the flattened disks you have made and let it hand with gravity whilst holding it at one end and slowly rotate it so gravity stretches it into a nice thin pizza base and pop onto the floured chopping board, if the base got a hole during this, just patch it up with a piece of dough from the crust. 

It is really important in the next step to remember, less is more.. you only want a small amount of sauce and toppings else it will weight down the bread and release too much moisture and grease and it will ruin it.

Add your toppings of choice (post coming soon on my perfect pizza sauce) and then carefully slide it off the board onto the pizza stone or upside-down tray, being careful to gently wiggle the pizza into the oven so it doesn't break.

Bake for 5-7 minutes or until lovely and golden. Remove from the oven and immediately brush the crust with some extra virgin olive oil, cut into slices and server!