I began my sourdough starter about a year and a half ago, after reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. I learned that the reason San Francisco’s so well known for its sourdough is because of the unique strains of yeast and bacteria in the air here (the bacteria are what create the sour flavor). That means that it’s relatively easy to make your own starter in the Bay Area — all you have to do is give the microbes a place to land and some food. I won’t go through it all here, but I used this website as a guide. Basically, you just mix flour and water and let it sit for a week or two, occasionally “feeding” it with more flour and water. Once my starter got going, I began keeping it in the fridge and only feeding it every few weeks. Then whenever I wanted to bake with it, I’d just take it out the night before, feed it, let it grow overnight, and use it for my recipes. A little while after feeding, it looks like this (the bubbles are carbon dioxide being produced by the yeast):

To make the sourdough pizza crust, I followed the basic recipe from The Cheese Board Collective Works (the Cheese Board, a cheese & pizza shop across the street from Chez Panisse, is a Berkeley institution). The dough consisted of:

• 1 c bread flour
• 1/2 c lukewarm water
• 1/2 tsp kosher salt
• 1/2 c starter

I mixed the flour and water together first, let it sit for 10 mins, then added the salt and the starter. After the dough came together, I let it sit for 10 more mins (this is called “autolyse”, when the gluten in the flour absorbs the water and makes the dough easier to knead later on). After 10 minutes of kneading, the dough looked like this:

Sourdough bread requires a little more planning ahead than normal bread because it needs long rise times to let the sour flavor develop in the dough. This pizza dough is less work than normal bread, though, because you don’t have to punch down the dough or do anything during the rise. After about 6 hours of rising (the bowl was covered with plastic wrap in between) , the dough looked like this:

I shaped it into a round, topped it with sauce, mozzarella, feta, sun-dried tomatoes, and onions, and baked it in a 450°F oven on the baking stone for about 20 minutes. Here’s the finished product:

The crust was delicious — soft and chewy, with a subtle sourdough flavor. Needless to say, we finished the whole thing!

Welcome to my new cooking blog! I’ll be posting updates about new recipes I try, my tried-and-true favorites, and various other topics like restaurants and cookbooks. Enjoy!