Adventures in Sourdough, Episode 4: Pizza!

Mandough is still healthy and alive, but I decided that perhaps he was a bit too...doughy.  All three bread recipes so far have been a little on the dense side, which lead me to wonder if the hydration ratio in our starter is a little off.  I did a little research and per the Interwebz, starter should be somewhere in the range of pancake batter to warm peanut butter in consistency.  So when I fed it this week, I upped the amount of water a touch.

I also split off some more starter for my neighbor...yes, the same neighbor who we gave Gro-goo to last week, because there was an "incident" with an elbow and a hard fall to the kitchen floor...

Someone executed Order 66 on Gro-goo.

We needed a break from having fresh bread in the house all week.  We love carbs, but they don't love us back.  So this week we decided to make pizza dough with the discard.  

We followed the King Arthur flour recipe (minus the addition of yeast, and "pizza flavor").  This was the first time I used my Kitchenaid & dough hook to knead the dough, and I think I should probably do that more often.  It was a big help, especially since I jammed my elbow on my dominant arm the night before in an unfortunate roller skating accident. Kid's birthday parties are dangerous, man.

The dough ended up a touch on the sticky side; we transferred it from the stand mixer bowl to a greased stainless bowl, and then I busted out my newest bread-making purchase...

A terry-cloth lined shower cap, for $3 at Walmart.  I've been seeing a lot of cute reusable bowl covers in recipes online, and was feeling a smidge guilty about burning through plastic wrap...so I bought this, and flipped it inside out so that the plastic layer is closer to the dough to hold in moisture.

I let the dough proof all day (started it in the morning), and about 5pm it had doubled in size and was ready for pizza time!

We stretched the dough on our pizza stone and let it proof for about 15 minutes.  I should have done a par-bake at this point, but we were hungry, so I just slapped on some sauce, toppings & cheese and threw it in the oven.

Sausage & pepperoni, with pineapple on half for me & Lil' Man, and Jalapenos on the other side for The Hubs.

I would use this recipe again, but would probably do the par-bake to aim for a crispier crust. And luckily--the recipe made enough for two crusts, so we froze the other one and have it available whenever we need it!