Sourdough Rolls

This is the simplest sourdough recipe you will find. Makes 12 dinner rolls.

500g flour

330g warm water

7g salt

125g active sourdough starter

Tools:

Proofing container

Spatula

Dough scraper

9"x12" baking pan

Parchment paper

Combine all the ingredients in a bowl until evenly mixed, no need to knead. Cover and leave on the counter for 10-12 hours, allowing the dough to at least double. You can also put the dough in the fridge to delay the process.

Dump  dough on a floured surface and form into 12 balls, about 75g each. Line a 9"x12" baking pan with parchment paper, sprinkle semolina flour, place balls in pan, and cover with a plastic bag or damp tea towel. Let rise for 2-6 hours.

Preheat oven to 425f/220c. Slice into the tops of the rolls with a lame, straight razor blade, or very sharp knife; this will let steam escape. Optionally, glaze the top of the buns with olive oil, aquafaba, or egg wash to give them a glossy coat, and grind some coarse sea salt on top. Bake for 25 minutes until golden brown. Remove from pan and place on a wire rack to cool.

Poolish Pizza Dough

Ingredients

For the poolish pre-ferment:

500g white flour
500g hand-warm water

0.5g instant dry yeast

For the dough
Fermented poolish

250g white flour

15g salt

Equipment

Kitchen Scale

Large and small stainless steel mixing bowls

Damp tea towel (or plastic shopping bag)

Silicone spatula

Dough scraper

Pizza stone

Pizza peel

Parchment paper

Friday morning (or ~30 hours before you want to bake the pizzas)

Make your poolish. Mix 500g flour with 0.5g instant dry yeast. Add 500g warm water and mix together until you have a batter-like consistency. Place in a container with a lid; I use a 3l rectangular plastic container with a snap-on lid, but you can use any bowl. Put the lid on loosely, or cover with a silicone cover, but not too tight as you do want gasses created during the ferment to escape.

Leave at room temperature for 1-2 hours, then place in the fridge for 24 hours.

Saturday Noon

Mix together the 15g salt and the remaining 250g flour. Combine in a bowl with the poolish, and mix until uniform. Knead the dough for about 15-20 minutes. The dough may be sticky, but don't worry too much about it at this point - your hands might be covered in dough, as will your work surface, but that is normal. There are other things you can do so it doesn't get too sticky, but best thing to do is to keep working the dough.

You can also use a stand mixer with a dough hook, or use a bread maker on dough setting.

After kneading, put the dough in a bowl and let sit at room temperature, covered.

After 20 minutes, fold the dough. Wet your hands. With the bowl in front of you, grab the edge of the dough farthest away from you, pull it up as far as you can without tearing, and bring towards you to fold over top of the dough. Rotate the bowl 90 degrees and fold again, repeat, repeat, so you have folded 4 times. Let sit for another 20 minutes, and fold again 4 times. Let sit for another 20 minutes and fold again.

Let dough rest, covered, at room temperature for 1 hour.

Ball the dough. At this point, it makes life much easier to use olive oil on your hands, though just wetting your hands will also work. There are a lot of techniques to ball the dough, go to YouTube. Cut 250g of dough with your dough scraper, and form into a ball. You want to make the skin of the dough taught on the top of the ball by pulling it towards the bottom, then twist the bottom to "lock" it. Place the ball in a dough tray, or in individual small pyrex or plastic rubbermaid containers. 

Let the dough balls sit at room temperature for about 2 hours. You should see bubbles forming on the surface. 

If you don't need the pizza right away, you can put it in the fridge, taking it out about 1 hour before you are ready to bake. Alternatively, you can freeze the dough balls at this point.

Shaping pizzas. 

Have a smaller stainless steel bowl with flour. Do not flatten the dough ball  - take a ball and put in the flour, then move the dough ball to a work surface. Shape the dough into a pizza-shaped circle by pressing down in the middle of the ball, and working it out to a disk - avoid squishing the rim of the pizza, rather push out from the middle. Try not to push out the air bubbles, which should remain in the edge of the crust. You may need to let the dough rest for a few minutes then stretch again to get the size you want.

Keeping the dough from sticking can be difficult, particularly if you let the pizza sit too long (which, if you are chatting with someone, minding the kids etc., will happen. You can end up with a pizza stuck to your work surface. There are good techniques on moving stick formed dough, but they all assume you have absolute focus on your pizza making with no distractions. A great hack is to form your pizza on a piece of parchment paper, which makes it easy to move the dough to the oven. Do not put your sauce on the dough until right before you are ready to put it in the oven, otherwise the dough will just turn to a sticky mess.

Baking

You want as hot an oven as you can get. I have a  BBQ which has three burners below and a broiler. If you have a pizza oven, that is the best option. I put the pizza stone in the BBQ, and put all four burners, and heat the BBQ to 700F.

Slide the pizza onto the hot stone. Using your pizza peel and a spatula (or pizza turner), rotate the pizza every 30 seconds or so when the cheese is bubbling and black specs appear on the crust, and the crust has puffed up.

You can also cook the pizza in a regular oven with excellent results. Place a pizza stone in the middle rack. Heat up at the highest temperature your oven can reach, 500F or 550F, for at least an hour. Shape pizza, spread sauce only, and cook until crust starts to turn golden, about 5 minutes. Remove and add remaining toppings, and cook until cheese begins to bubble.