Sourdough pizza

What is your recipe and process? If you want the dough to ferment faster you need more starter in it. I ferment my pizzas 24-48 hours at 15C, but have also made same day pizzas with more starter.

What do you do after the first rise? If it ferments less than 12 hours you don't need to do anything to it after mix and some kneading, machine kneading or stretch and folds.

Do you bake in a pan or on some kind of steel or stone? 

It's very hard to construct a good recipe by discovering a lot of facts about the process. It's likely to fail in a number of different ways at the same time. Make sure that you are using one single well-known successful recipe, NOT combining the best features of different ones, and that you're following your single recipe exactly.

Hi, Yo, 

This is funny -- Friday nights are also pizza nights at my house! :D 

I've learned a few things between living in Naples, Italy and experimenting at home;  I hope you don't mind if I share.

-Neapolitan pizza shops use a hybrid "old dough" method of preferment (some places have been using the same levain sourdough preferment for decades) -- but they also spike their dough with commercial yeast. It's not pure wild yeast.  Essentially, they get the flavor profile from a very aged culture but spiking allows the flexibility and predictability of commercial yeast.  

-they use the 00 flour, which is Italian superfine flour -- expensive and not common in the US. APF is a suitable replacement, but not exactly the same. 

-they prepare their dough many hours before and keep them in airtight, cold containers until ready to use, depending on demand. 

-they use wood-fired dome brick ovens which can go up to >800-1000 F.  Home ovens upper limit is 500-550 F. 

I find that pure wild yeast dough tends to be too tough  for pizza because of the stronger gluten structure compared to commercial yeast dough.  Maybe try a poolish version? Something like https://www.weekendbakery.com/posts/pizza-dough-with-a-poolish/

Hope this helps!  :)

--Mark

I've made sourdough pizzas for a few years and can share some observations.

What kind of pizza are you trying to make? What is your goal? 

With 500C you can't make a true Neapolitan pizza since the most important ingredient is temperature. You can of course make great pizzas that take longer to bake in your oven. What setting and how you should manage your oven is difficult to say since no two people got the same setup.

I make sourdough pizza by using an active starter around the time it peaks, no poolish or pre-dough or anything like that. What you need is essentially an active and healthy starter. It can be used sooner and later after feeding with some possible differences, but if you try to use it around peak every time, that will help with your consistency. For the sake of simplicity I would suggest you just use a fed and active starter.

You don't need and don't want 0 or 00 flour with an oven that can't go higher than 500F. Try a normal bread flour.

With 500F I would expect your pies to finish between 6-12 minutes  depending on various parameters.

I would say there are five key aspects which will determine your success.

1. The recipe. There are many out there, some better than others, some for 800F ovens, some for 500F ovens. For your oven, I would try a pretty simple recipe with flour, starter, salt, water, maybe some oil and sugar for consistency and color.

2. The dough handling. With shorter fermentation times you probably want to knead or S&F the dough to develop gluten sufficiently. With fermentation times over 24 hours at 15C or higher  this becomes less important since time does the job for you. You can develop gluten manually or with a mixer.

3. The starter and starter amount. Your starter is unique, like everyone's is, and it's impossible for us to predict what your dough needs. You just have to start somewhere and experiment. The more active the starter is, the less is needed in the dough. There are some ways to make a pretty good educated guess, but first we'd have to see the recipe. 

4. Fermentation temperature. The dough ferments as a result of the starter activity, starter amount and fermentation temperature. When you got control of these three, you can make well-fermented doughs that got many hours of a window where they are usable. 

5. Bake. Temperatures, oven setting, what you bake on. There are many different ways to do it. 

If these five parameters work out, you'll get good pizza. If I should rank them by importance I'd say starter and starter amount, fermentation temperature, recipe, dough handling and finally bake.

I think you'll do yourself a favor by first deciding what you want to make, then find the best approach for that with your equipment and ingredients.

Over years of making pizza, I have learned that time is your best friend as far as the dough is concerned.

A lot of artisanal pizza places will ferment their dough for AT LEAST 24 hours before even considering turning them into a pizza. In my experience, I have found that the longer I let my dough relax in the fridge, the better it gets (both flavor and texture).

My go-to 'recipe' for 3-4 small-ish pies is something like 500g AP flour (00 is great, but I'm on a budget), 325-333g H20 (depending on the flour--different AP flours have different absorptions), a glug of olive oil, 10g salt, and 50-100g active starter. Mix it up and knead it. Let it rise (either on the counter or in the fridge, whatever I have time for), after which divide into however many pizzas you want. Shape them into tight balls, put them each into individual plastic take-out containers, throw into the fridge and voilà. When I want to use them, I will take them out of the fridge about 1.5-2 hours before I want to shape them ; they're usually small enough that they can warm up quickly enough.

If I only have the stomach for 2 pizzas on pizza night, I will usually just let the third dough ball hang out for up to two more days, at which time I can either make another pizza or just brush it with oil and herbs to use as fresh bread for another meal.