Sourdough Pizza Recipe Serious Eats

Kenji is the former culinary director for Serious Eats and a current culinary consultant for the site. He is also a New York Times food columnist and the author of The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science.

Any New Yorker who eats bread has most likely tried some of the magical edible stuff thatJim Laheyproduces atSullivan Street Bakeryor at Sullivan Street Pizza (formerly known as Co.).

Through meticulous scientific investigation, I think I've finally discovered the true secret to getting bread as good as Lahey's on a completely, 100% consistent basis. Step one: get Jim Lahey to make it.

Sourdough Pizza Crust Recipe

Ok, ok. So I admit, it's not a particularly practical method, and my sample pool here was one. That said, when Mark Bittman and Jim Lahey dropped theno-knead breadrecipe on the world back in 2006, with a single short youtube video, they did more to improve home baking than perhaps any other single event in history. I know that I've personally never looked back. (Seemy own explanation of the science here).

Lahey's first book, My Bread, was all about the no-knead method. The way you do it? Just mix flour, salt, and yeast, add water, stir it all together, then let it sit in a covered bowl for eight or nine hours. Over the course of this long fermentation, enzymes break down large flour proteins into smaller segments that can then quite easily be cross-linked into stretchy sheets of gluten. You wind up with a dough that stretches as if it had been perfectly kneaded, without any of the oxidation that occurs with actual kneading.

Did for bread. It's largely based on his no-knead dough, with dozens of recipes for topping combinations that are tomato-based, white sauce-based, and completely sauceless. You'll find most of the pies from Sullivan Street Pizza within its pages.

Crispy Bar Style Pizza Recipe

If there's one thing any home pizza maker can tell you, it's that it's nearly impossible to get the same bubbly, crisp, charring that you get from a real-deal wood-fired Neapolitan pizza oven. Check out the video below as Jim Lahey shows us that not only is it possible, it's actually pretty damn easy to do. 

While I'm not picky about the flour—either bread flour or all-purpose is fine—what does concern me is how the dough is handled. Treat it gently so the dough holds its character, its texture. When you get around to shaping the disk for a pie, go easy as you stretch it to allow it to retain a bit of bumpiness (I think of it as blistering), so not all of the gas is smashed out of the fermented dough. I prefer to hold off on shaping the ball until just before topping it. If it's going to sit for a while—more than a couple of minutes—cover it with a damp kitchen towel to prevent it from drying out. I offer you two approaches for shaping. The simpler one, executed completely on the work surface, is slower than the second, where you lift the disk in the air and stretch it by rotating it on your knuckles. Lifting it into the air to shape it is more fun, too.

*The % Daily Value (DV) tells you how much a nutrient in a food serving contributes to a daily diet. 2, 000 calories a day is used for general nutrition advice.

The Pizza Lab: Three Doughs To Know

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When you visit the site, Dotdash Meredith and its partners may store or retrieve information on your browser, mostly in the form of cookies. Cookies collect information about your preferences and your devices and are used to make the site work as you expect it to, to understand how you interact with the site, and to show advertisements that are targeted to your interests. You can find out more about our use, change your default settings, and withdraw your consent at any time with effect for the future by visiting Cookies Settings, which can also be found in the footer of the site.

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