Pizza doesn’t have to be a time consuming process and can usually be made with stuff in your fridge or freezer. This pizza uses some of my sourdough starter discard and a little bit of yeast. It’s a very low hydration dough which made for a really crispy crust which is something I’ve been searching for a lot lately.

Like I mentioned above, this is a very dry dough. I was looking for one that would be extremely crispy so between the low hydration, long pre-heat of the skillet and a little fat (in the way of butter), I got what I wanted! Because this dough has such low hydration, don’t expect it to rise as much as a typical dough would.

Ingredients:

Dough

Makes two 10-12″ pizzas. 10″ of rolled dough fit perfectly in an 8″ cast iron skillet.

• 383g (~2 1/2 cups) All Purpose flour
• 134g (~1/2 cup) filtered water @ 85’F
• 80g sourdough starter discard
• 1 tsp sea salt
• 1/2 tsp bakers yeast
• 2 Tbsp room temperature unsalted butter
• 1 Tbsp Italian herb seasoning

Method:

I combined all of the above ingredients together in a stand mixer with the dough hook attachment and mixed then kneaded for about 10 minutes. I stopped a few times during the kneading process to form the dough into a ball since it didn’t want to come together too well at the beginning.

After the kneading process, I lightly covered the dough ball in olive oil and place it in an olive oil coated bowl and then covered it with plastic wrap. I let that sit at room temperature for about 4 hours before placing it in the fridge until about an hour before I wanted to make my pizza.

After about 6 hours in the refrigerator I took the dough out, divided it in half and then placed each half in its own olive oil coated bowl so it could come back up to room temperature. I also put my cast iron skillets in the oven and started to preheat them at 500’F. When I was ready to start making my pizzas I rolled the dough out to about 10″ rounds (to fit in my 8″ skillets with a little to go up the sides).

I carefully took the hot cast iron skillets out of the oven and laid my pre-shaped dough into them. I quickly added my sauce (home made with tomatoes from our garden), cheese, pepperoni, green chile and caramelized onions. After adding a little more cheese I used a brush to coat the crust so it wouldn’t burn as easily.

Once I was done making the pizza, I threw it in the oven for about 10 minutes at 500’F and then a minute or two with the broil setting on. The pizza came out bubbling and delicious looking. I let it cool in the skillet for a few minutes and then transferred it to a wire rack to cool slightly more.

Result:

This dough was pretty tough to work with but if you’re a fan of crispy pizza crust, it’s worth giving it a try. Even being very liberal with sauce and toppings, the slice held its shape and didn’t droop at all. I didn’t get any noticeable flavor from the sourdough discard, probably because a lot of the flavor was masked by the addition of the Italian seasoning.

While I’m happy with how this turned out, I’m definitely going to experiment with this a little bit more. The first thing I’ll do is up the hydration a little bit. After that I’ll probably play with adding some more sourdough starter discard.

My Baking Notes

• Ambient temperature: 74’F
• Water temp: 85’F
• Mixed @ 7:50am
• Bulk fermentation start @ 8:00am
• Into fridge @ 12:15pm
• Divided dough at 6:00pm
• Started preheating oven w/ cast iron skillet @ 6:05pm
• Into oven @ 7:20pm