Wood Fired Pizza Dough
Equipment
- KitchenAid Mixer
- Sourdough Starter from Cultures for Health
- Polenta Corn Grits to allow pizzas to roll off the pizza peel (not for adding to dough recipe!)
Ingredients
- 2 cups sourdough starter, unfed/discard 454 grams
- 1¼ cup water, warm 282-340 grams, start with smaller amount
- 5 cups all purpose flour, unbleached, organic 600 grams (or half all purpose and half 00 pizza flour)
- 2 tsp sea salt
- 1-1½ tsp active dry yeast (depending on your sourdough starter) *see note if you don’t have a sourdough starter
Instructions
- Stir the unfed sourdough starter before measuring out 2 cups of the starter; pour this into the large bowl of a Kitchenaid stand mixer. Go ahead and feed the remainder of your starter, if necessary, and set it aside.
- Weigh your flour with a kitchen scale. If you don’t have a scale, use a cup plus the back of a butter knife to get even cup measurements.
- Next, combine the lesser amount of water, flour, salt, and yeast to the sourdough starter; you can “tare” to get exact measurements when using a scale. This helps to get consistently good dough every time. (I highly recommend a weight scale for the best pizza dough!)
- Using a dough hook attachment, turn on the mixer. If the mixed dough looks dry, start adding the remaining water 1 tablespoon until the dough cleans the sides of the bowl and forms a beautiful dough ball. (Kneading by hand is a great workout if you don’t have a mixer and will still result in a beautiful pizza crust.)
- Once the dough ball is formed, rub olive oil in a clean bowl, add the dough, cover, and let rise until almost doubled in size. Let the dough rise for about 2-4 hours in a warm kitchen. (If you’re in a hurry, you can use 2 teaspoons of active dry yeast.)
- Divide the dough into 6-8 pieces or however many servings you need, depending on the size of your pizza oven. (Measuring is highly recommended!)
- Cut the same number of pieces of parchment paper as you have pizza crusts. These will keep the dough from sticking to one another. You can use polenta, corn grits, or corn meal lightly sprinkled on the parchment to help scoot the pizzas into the pizza oven.
- Next, shape each dough ball into a personal size pizza crust using your hands on a lightly floured surface. Thin-crust pizza is my favorite, but you need a bit of thickness for wood-fired pizzas. Let the shaped crust rest at room temperature while you get the oven ready.
- Build the fire in your pizza oven. Once it is very hot or above 500 degrees Fahrenheit, use a pizza peel to slide the pizzas into the oven. (I use a pinch of corn grits on my peel to help the dough slide into the oven, or you can use additional flour.)
- Bake until it’s done, then flip over, add toppings and bake until cheese is melty or until your toppings are done and the crust is browned to your liking.
Video
Notes
Watch this video to see the process of how I make wood-fired pizzas in our World Market Fish Shaped Pizza Oven. Noting that this is how we do it and what works for us.
If I start this dough early enough, I don’t use the active dry yeast. My sourdough is strong enough to use on its own with a 24-36 hour window. However, most of the time, I’m in a hurry and I end up using both sourdough starter and the active dry yeast. If you don’t have sourdough starter you can simply leave it out and use the full amount of yeast. Keep in mind you may need to adjust the amount of flour or liquid in the recipe.
Tried this recipe?Let us know how it was!