Sourdough Pizza Crust

Take your slice game to the next level with sourdough pizza crust! A pretty hands-off recipe, all you need is basic ingredients and time.

We’ve been making sourdough pizza crust every week for the last six months. Hooray for pizza Friday, every Friday! Seriously though, it’s that easy. It can become part of your regular routine and hardly takes more time than ordering in.

With just a few minutes of active time – mixing, stretching and folding, and rolling – plus some patience, you will have enough dough for two large pizzas. We’ve got lots of tips in the post below, and recommend freezing half the batch to use later. You’ll thank yourself if you do!

We also have instructions on baking on both a pizza stone and a regular baking sheet, so don’t worry if you don’t have special equipment. All you really need is an active sourdough starter, a big mixing bowl, and an oven!

Jump to:

• Baker’s Schedule
• Ingredients
• Method
• Tips & Notes
• Substitutions
• Recipe

Baker’s Schedule

Day One

Mix (1 hour): In the evening, mix the dough. Do the stretches and folds every 20 minutes over the course of an hour.

Place the dough into a warm, draft-free place to rise, covered, overnight.

Day Two

If you prefer, refrigerate the dough during the day before shaping. About an hour and a half before you want to eat, shape and roll out your dough. Top, bake, and serve.

Use the JUMP TO RECIPE button at the top of the post, or scroll to the bottom of the post, to see the full recipe card with ingredient measurements and instructions.

Ingredients

• water
• active sourdough starter
• olive oil
• flour
• sugar
• sea salt

Method

Add the water, starter, and olive oil to a large mixing bowl, and whisk until well combined. Stir in the flour, sugar, and salt with a wooden spoon, until you have a shaggy dough.

Over the next hour, do four rounds of stretches and folds (i.e. one round every 20 minutes). This can be spread out over more time if you prefer, but give the dough a minimum of 20 minutes to rest between each stretch.

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After the stretches are finished, your dough should look like a loose ball and have some tension present (see picture below). Cover it with a damp tea towel or plate and set it in a warm, draft free place to rise until doubled in size, about eight hours or overnight.

Once the dough has risen, tip it out onto a well floured surface. Cut it into two approximately equal pieces, then follow the shaping instructions for both, or place one half of the dough into an airtight container to refrigerate or freeze.

TIP: If you’re less familiar with sourdough, you may want to refrigerate the whole batch of pizza dough (after it’s completed the first rise, before shaping) so that it’s easier to shape. So if you’re going through this process and finding it a bit tricky at this step, pop it in the fridge for at least an hour before continuing.

Flatten your piece of dough slightly, then roll it into a log from the short end. Turn the log 90°, place it so that the seam faces up, and then roll it into a log again. You can see a visual of this in our naan post.

Place the rolled up dough seam side down, now, onto a clean surface. Lightly flour the top of it and then use your hands to rotate the dough into a ball, forming surface tension on the top – the same way you would for a sourdough boule.

Place your dough onto a sheet of parchment paper (use a scraper if needed) and lightly flour the top of it. Use a rolling pin to roll it out to about 1-1.5cm (about ¾ in.). Cover the dough with a damp tea towel and let it rise again until slightly puffy, 1-1.5 hours.

Prep any toppings – marinara, homemade pesto, cheese, vegetables – and preheat the oven to 475°F (250°C), with a pizza stone inside if you have one. If not, place the dough onto a regular baking sheet before adding the toppings.

Top your pizza, and once the oven is preheated, slide it onto the preheated pizza stone (or slide the pan into the oven, middle rack) and bake for 12-15 minutes. The crust should be golden and crisp when it’s ready. Then slice and serve!

With a baking sheet, you might have to bake a little longer – go by how your crust is looking. Some people swear by adding the cheese halfway through the baking time, but unless you’re adding mounds of cheese, it should be fine to add all the toppings before baking.

Tips & Notes

The dough can be frozen for up to a month in an airtight container. We like to have one half in the freezer so we’re only making pizza dough twice a month to eat once a week.

If you are freezing the dough, make sure you thaw it in the refrigerator (just take it out of the freezer the night before) rather than at room temperature. At room temp, the outside of the dough thaws too quickly compared to the middle – and the yeasts activate again – so you might have a dough explosion even though the middle is still frozen.

We haven’t tried cooking this on a barbeque, yet. It should work fine as long as you’re still using a pizza stone. We don’t recommend cooking it directly on the oven rack.

This is very similar to our sourdough naan (the naan is actually adapted from the pizza dough recipe) so if you’d like, you can also make naan pizzas. Fry the dough in a pan then do a quick bake just to melt the cheese or heat the toppings.

Refrigerating the Dough

We’ve included the tip about refrigerating the dough for a couple reasons. One, it really is easier to work with when cold. More importantly, though, many of you will probably be mixing this in the evening before bed, like we usually do. That means you have risen dough at 8AM and you’re not planning on eating pizza for about twelve hours.

So if that’s the case, simply tightly cover your dough and pop it in the fridge until you’re ready to roll it out. The rising/resting time after rolling is plenty of time to bring it back to room temperature before baking, and the flavour improves with some refrigeration time anyway.

That being said, it’s just as easy to mix this as soon as you get up and have pizza ready for the evening. If your sourdough starter is strong then this is no problem.

Substitutions

We’ve made this dough with up to 50% whole wheat or spelt flour with no problems at all. If you want a more wholesome and flavourful dough, you can definitely add a portion of whole wheat flour.

If you like a really chewy crust, you can use all or part bread flour here. Both ways are great.

Here’s our favourite yeast pizza dough if you don’t have a sourdough starter. The sugar is really the only thing that’s easy to sub here. We’ve made it with honey, maple syrup, and coconut sugar all without any problems.

More Great Savoury Sourdough Recipes

Sourdough Biscuits
Sourdough Naan
Savoury Chive Pancakes with Sourdough Starter
Sourdough Focaccia
Sourdough Crackers with Homemade Za’atar

If you make this recipe, let us know by tagging @baked_theblog + #bakedtheblog on Instagram! We love to feel like we’re in the kitchen with you.