Sourdough Pizza Crust

This sourdough pizza dough bakes up into a crust with a complex, slightly tangy flavor and a texture that has the perfect balance of chewiness and crispiness. You can use it as the foundation for any pizza toppings you like, and it's super-easy to make. Because sourdough is slow-rising, it needs time to rest, so be sure to start the process at least a day and a half before you want to eat the pizza—longer if you also need to make the starter.

What Exactly Is a Sourdough Starter for Pizza Crust?

This recipe is made with a sourdough starter—the exact same kind you'd use to to make sourdough bread. So if you already have a sourdough starter in your fridge, you are well on your way to making sourdough pizza crust. In fact, it's a great way to use up extra starter. If you don't have starter, see if you can get some from a friend, or make your own with this sourdough starter recipe.

Sourdough is the mother of all doughs. Way before the addition of yeast into baked goods, a simple mixture of water and flour was the base of all bread. Naturally found bacteria in the wheat, along with wild yeast that's in the air, develop when water is added. When left long enough to ferment, the dough rises and achieves its remarkably delicious tang. Thus, sourdough pizza is the original pizza; no yeast added.

In addition to bread and pizza crust, you can use a sourdough starter to make biscuits, pancakes, rolls, pretzels, and any other baked good you'd like to give the wonderful tang of sourdough.

How to Properly Fold Bread Dough

Here's Why Sourdough Makes the Best Pizza Crust

• Sourdough crust has great flavor: Yeasted pizza dough is great, but the flavor of sourdough is much more complex.
• Sourdough has spectacular texture: A good sourdough makes for pizza that is airy, toothsome, and crisps up nicely.
• It lasts a long time in the fridge: The slower natural yeasts in a sourdough starter help the dough last longer in the refrigerator than regular pizza dough, meaning you can make a larger batch of dough and have a stock of refrigerated oven-ready pizza dough for up to a week. Be mindful that once made, this dough needs at least 24 hours of refrigeration before baking.

The Formula for Sourdough Pizza Dough

The quantities for our tasty dough are in a 1-2-3 ratio: one part sourdough starter—which you need to have ready for this recipe—two parts water, and three parts flour. It's easily scaled up or down. A kitchen scale is very helpful for making this dough, but we've also given volume measurements in case you don't have a scale.

This dough is pretty soft; if you like it firmer, start with 100 grams of water and add more as you see fit. Different flours can absorb different amounts of water, so your flour may need more or less water to achieve the intended consistency.

Tips for Making Sourdough Pizza Crust

• How to use 00 flour for pizza dough—00 flour is a very finely ground flour from Italy that is considered to be the best flour to use for pasta and pizza dough. The primary thing to know about using this type of flour for pizza dough is that it absorbs less water than bread flour or all-purpose flour. For this dough, you may substitute 00 flour for the bread flour, but start by adding only 100 grams of water and working up to 110 grams.
• About dough hydration—Hydration refers to the baker's percentage of water compared to flour in a dough. The weight of flour in the dough represents 100% and the weights of other ingredients may be divided by the flour weight to determine their percentages. This recipe makes a 66% hydration dough (120 grams water divided by 180 grams flour equals 0.6666), which is a fairly wet dough. Wetter doughs perform better in home ovens because home ovens do not get ultra-hot like a pizza oven. A superhot oven will cook a pizza in minutes, which is not enough time to cook the water out of a high hydration dough. A pizza takes longer to cook in a home oven, allowing more time for the water to cook out.
• Fresh vs. low-moisture mozzarella for pizza—Fresh mozzarella has a higher water content than (aptly-named) low-moisture mozz. Fresh mozzarella is great for Neapolitan-style pies, but if you want cheese with more stretch, flavor, and salt, choose low-moisture mozzarella.