Bake a pizza - PEP BB food.sand.pizza

Hello! I bake my own pizza from a sourdough starter and eat it just about every Friday (all hail, pizza night!). I've also written a 4-part series on "wild caught" sourdough, in which I cover:

1) why you should use this method to bake bread
2) how to capture wild yeast from sourdough
3) how to bake sourdough bread from a starter, and
4) how to make a pizza dough from sourdough starter.

This post is for the sand BB on baking a pizza. I follow the methods outlined in Ed and Jean Wood's book, Classic Sourdoughs, with some adaptations likely due to climate and environment. This most recent pizza night featured a pizza made with oregano, garlic scapes, and potato onions I grew myself, plus reddening lepiota mushrooms that volunteered themselves in my garden, and nitrate-free bacon from a local rancher. I don't use sauce.

First, I needed to reactivate the culture. Here it is fresh from the fridge:


Reactivated culture:


Then the culture proof:


Kneading the dough:


Dough proof:


Rolled out dough:


Putting on toppings:


Finished pizza:


Slicing pizza:


Pizza bottom:

Garden of delights = pizza night!
I used cherry tomatoes,  1 eggplant roasted, 1 small zucchini-like squash, thyme, basil, chives, oregano, sprinkled with the rest of the fresh herbs after cooking.  Organic marinated artichoke hearts and org tomato paste purchased and already had. Crust whole wheat flour substitute for recipe and let rise x 2 for 15 min, baked for 12 min.
Recipe I used https://www.thespruceeats.com/mediterranean-style-pizza-1705808

https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/bobby-flay/pizza-dough-recipe-1921714.amp

I’m doing bread and pizza today. I liked the idea of Paul’s polydough but wanted to use sourdough starter in place of yeast so I mixed four cups of whole wheat flour with four cups of water, four cups of brown rice and all the starter that I would discard for today as a sponge. I mixed that up and let it sit for about 20 hours before mixing in some pepitas, about a teaspoon of salt, and enough all purpose flour to dry it out and get it stuff enough to work with. I cut a section off from the main blob for the pizza and waited another three hours. Then I pressed it out flat, topped it with tomatoes, onions, basil, oregano, and cheese. I had to crumple up the edges of the crust for stiffness to get it onto the peel and into the oven. After about ten minutes at 450° F, I switched to the broiler and gave it a couple minutes of too heat to make brown spots on the cheese.