We are going to play with it for a bit in the next few weeks, I’ll post results as I go
I revived a starter from a culture that has been handed down through my family, it has decent leavening, and decent flavor and I hope it performs well for pizza
I do not plan to do a 100% straight sourdough, I will continue with my current dough formula with a hefty amount of my starter culture added to it just to get the flavor/texture that I want.
I work with sourdough bread everyday and have used it in pizza dough. We make our own starter and keep it on the sour side. I find it not to my liking for a NY pie but it does impart a sour flavor for sure. If you use ADY/IDY yeast it will lessen the sour than if using just pure sourdough starter. I didn’t fool with it long enough for pizza to come up with a formula I could share. I look forward to how you like it for pizza. Walter
I plan on adding about 20% sourdough starter to our IDY current dough formula, tweak it from there to get the characteristics that I want out of it, then test it on our customers to see where that takes us.
I imagine doing a straight sourdough leavened dough for our pizza would be more involved than I currently have time for.
So I’ll just keep feeding the culture, and use half of it per batch of dough or adjust as needed
I use a rye starter and a low IDY% preferment for the pizza dough. The rye starter is 8% of the dough and the IDY preferment is 8% of the dough. The combination gives great rise and taste without getting too sour. The book “Flour Water Salt Yeast” by Ken Forkish covers this topic and was the inspiration for my recipe. The “Pizza Bible” by Tony Gemignani covers this topic as well.
We did some taste testing involving our regulars tonight with our proposed sourdough option.
I was a bit disappointed with the lack of a sour note in flavor, but the workability of the dough was fantastic. it also developed a very interesting texture on the bottom of the crust. It was almost like a crispy fried texture. We do not bake in pans, we back directly on the deck of the oven with some corn meal used for peel lube. So this new fried’ish texture caught me off guard, but in a pleasant way.
So Now I plan to double the amount of starter sponge used in my next batch and see how that works out for us.
If we decide to not offer a sourdough crust option, I still plan to use this culture in my dough just because the crust texture on the bottom was so pleasant.
I will be baking a few loaves of bread with this dough just to see how that works out.