Sourdough Pizza

Start with the starter. Eighty grams of old starter fed with equal flour and a splash of water is just restocking a living culture — it's flour, water and wild yeast that's been kept going, sometimes for years, because baker's yeast is a twentieth-century shortcut and sourdough is simply what bread was before that shortcut existed. Shaping it into a log and cutting crosses isn't decoration: it opens surface area so you can actually watch it rise and judge "doubled" by eye, which is the only reliable signal — a clock tells you nothing about a living thing that speeds up in a warm kitchen and crawls in a cold one.

The float step — slicing the starter into sugared water for about an hour — is a crude but honest test. An active starter traps enough gas to float or at least loosen from the water; a tired, under-fed one sinks and stays sunk. If yours sinks, don't force it into the dough anyway — it means feed it again and wait, because a weak starter gives you a flat, dense base no amount of oven heat will fix later. Any plain white flour works for feeding; nothing fancy earns its keep here, the starter just wants food, not flavour.

For the dough itself, plain flour and water in that ratio give you a wet, slack mix on purpose — this is not a dough you can pick up and toss. The salt goes in last, deliberately after the starter has had a moment in the wet flour, because salt tightens gluten and slows yeast activity; add it too early and you fight the dough's own rise. Seven grams for this batch is a seasoning amount, not a preservative amount — don't be tempted to add more for "flavour," it'll just slow fermentation down further.

The repeated 20–30 minute folds are where the dough actually becomes bread-like. Each fold stretches and relaxes the gluten network a little further without deflating all the gas the starter is producing. Skip folds and rush to baking, and you get a pizza that's flat and tears when you lift a slice; respect them, and the base holds air pockets that puff at the edges in the oven — that's your "pizza crust" look, earned, not bought.

When you finally shape it, stretching from the edges toward the centre with your fingers (never a rolling pin at this stage) keeps those air pockets intact instead of crushing them flat — a rolling pin is for the laminated log earlier, not for the risen dough. Dust with semolina or rice flour under the dough, not regular flour: it's coarser, doesn't gum up, and lets the base slide rather than stick — in an ordinary flat, without a pizza stone, this is what stands in for the "bottom crisp" a stone would otherwise give you.

On toppings: canned chopped tomatoes work because they're already broken down and consistent — a fresh tomato brings unpredictable water content that can turn your careful dough soggy. Mozzarella goes on after the first ten minutes in the oven, not before, because cheese put in from the start just weeps water and fat into the crust while the base is still setting; added late, it melts without drowning everything underneath. Basil goes on at the very end, off the heat, because its aroma is volatile oil that cooks away to nothing if it meets 225°C for even a few minutes — treat it like a garnish, not an ingredient. For four people, one 30x40 tray is a reasonable, fair share — nobody's fighting over the last slice, nobody's left still hungry.

A domestic oven here is doing its honest best at 225°C, well short of a wood-fired 400°C+, so don't expect leopard-spotted char — expect an evenly coloured, well-risen base, which is its own reward and not a consolation prize.