Sourdough Pizza Dough: Adapting Your Starter for Pizza

A sourdough starter, or levain, is a preferment that leavens with wild yeast and lactic acid bacteria instead of commercial yeast. The bacteria make lactic acid, and some kinds make acetic acid too; Modernist Pizza credits that mix of acids with both the flavor and a stronger gluten network. Its longer fermentation also gives you more wiggle room in the schedule than commercial yeast, they find.

None of that makes it the only real way to ferment pizza. Modernist Pizza rejects the purist view outright: fermentation is fermentation, with a levain or with commercial yeast. Most pizzerias they visited worldwide use commercial yeast, and they point out that the toppings often outweigh the flavor difference. Use a levain because you like what it does, not because the dough needs it.

Starter hydration: why the Planner wants 100%

The Pizza Planner treats your levain as part of the recipe’s total flour and water, and it needs to know how those split. It assumes a levain at 100% hydration, equal weights of flour and water, so every 100 g of levain is 50 g of flour and 50 g of water. That’s the form Modernist Pizza’s recipes use, and Forkish’s and King Arthur’s levain builds both use equal weights of fresh flour and water.

If your starter is kept stiffer, the split changes. At 60% hydration, 100 g of starter is 62.5 g of flour and 37.5 g of water. Swap 231 g of it into the recipe below in place of the 100% levain and the dough drops from 70% to about 62% water (calculated). The Planner only supports a 100% levain, so build one for pizza day with equal weights of fresh flour and water. A single 1:2:2 build from a 60% starter comes out at about 90% hydration, and a second refresh brings it to about 98% (both calculated).

How much of the flour goes in the levain

The Planner states the levain as a share of the dough’s total flour, and supports 10 to 40%. Pick Sourdough starter in its Fine-tune panel and it starts at 20%.

For four 12-inch Neapolitan-style pizzas for a home oven, that works out like this. The grams are the Planner’s, rounded to whole grams, so the column can be a gram off its total:

Check it by adding up: 116 + 462 = 578 g of flour, and 116 + 289 = 405 g of water, which is 70%. The Planner’s sourdough route adds no commercial yeast.

To make 231 g of levain, the Planner suggests a 1:2:2 refresh: 46.2 g ripe starter, 92.5 g flour and 92.5 g water. With a 100% starter, the levain’s flour is 92.5 g plus the starter’s 23.1 g, which rounds to the 116 g in the table above.

Is the levain ready?

There’s no single right moment, and your starter’s speed depends on its own culture, its feeding and your kitchen. Use these cues rather than one fixed time:

• Ready: very bubbly, clearly expanded and still lively. Forkish describes his overnight starter as bubbly, goopy and lively; King Arthur’s sourdough pizza recipe, by Bryan Ford, builds its levain at 72 to 75°F until doubled, which takes about 3 to 4 hours. The Planner plans about 4 hours, with a window of 3 to 8.
• The float test: Modernist Pizza recommends it. Drop a spoonful into water: if it floats, it can leaven your dough; if it sinks, it’s too young or too old.
• Smell: a ripe culture smells subtly sweet but tangy. Vinegar and alcohol notes mean it’s over the hill.
• Past it: Modernist Pizza calls receding bubbles a warning sign that the culture has run out of food. A deflated levain has largely lost its leavening power.

Modernist Pizza describes two levers on sourness. Time: the longer a levain ripens after feeding, the more acidic it gets, and one used 8 to 10 hours after its last feed is much milder than one left longer. And temperature, which shifts the balance of bacteria: the bacteria that make only lactic acid prefer warmth, while those that also make acetic acid, the sharper one, prefer cold. If your crust is too sour, use the levain younger.

Recipe: sourdough Neapolitan-style dough

This follows the Planner’s sourdough route, which has the same shape as Bryan Ford’s recipe for King Arthur: a levain built a few hours ahead, a long rise on the counter, a day or two in the fridge and a couple of hours to warm up.

Makes 4 dough balls of 250 g, for four 12-inch pizzas. Active time about 35 minutes. Elapsed time about 35 hours to the first pizza, 24 of them in the fridge. Bake 6 to 10 minutes per pizza.

1. Build the levain: mix 46.2 g ripe starter with 92.5 g flour and 92.5 g water. Cover and leave at room temperature for about 4 hours (3 to 8), until it has expanded substantially and is bubbly throughout. A spoonful should float in water.
2. Mix the dough: dissolve 17 g salt in 289 g water. Add 231 g of the levain and break it up in the water by hand, then add 462 g flour and mix until no dry flour is left. Rest 20 minutes, then knead for 30 seconds to a minute until smooth.
3. First rise: cover and leave at room temperature for about 4 hours (3 to 6), until the dough is clearly expanded and airy, nearly doubled.
4. Divide into four 250 g pieces and shape each gently into a ball.
5. Refrigerate the covered balls at 34 to 41°F (1 to 5°C) for about 24 hours. Expect gradual expansion and some small bubbles.
6. Take the balls out about 2 hours (1½ to 3) before baking and keep them covered, until they are soft, airy and stretch without snapping back.
7. Preheat a steel or stone at 500 to 550°F (260 to 288°C) for 45 to 60 minutes, then stretch each ball to 12 inches, top lightly and bake for 6 to 10 minutes, until the base is cooked through.

The Planner’s long-cold schedule doubles the fridge stage to about 48 hours; Ford’s recipe allows 24 to 48. A starter that’s slower or faster than average will move every stage, which is why each step has a cue.

Forkish’s Overnight Levain: a same-day route

Ken Forkish calls his Overnight Levain Pizza Dough his favorite in The Elements of Pizza for texture and flavor. It’s a pure levain dough, and it runs on a different schedule.

Salt is 2.8% of the total flour. Two levain figures are easy to mix up here, and both are right. The flour inside the levain, 125 g, is 25% of the total flour: that’s the share of the flour that was prefermented. The whole levain, 250 g of flour and water, weighs as much as 50% of the total flour. The dough comes to 864 g: three balls of about 288 g.

He mixes the starter in the evening and the dough 10 to 12 hours later, when the starter is bubbly, goopy and lively. The dough gets a 3-hour first rise and 5 to 6 hours as balls at about 70°F (21°C), and the balls then hold for 3 to 4 hours. Or refrigerate them 4 hours after shaping and make pizza the next day, taking them out an hour ahead.

The Planner doesn’t model the same-day version. Its sourdough route always includes a cold ferment, and it won’t build a same-day sourdough plan; Forkish’s next-day option is the closest match. His levain holds 25% of the flour, inside the Planner’s 10 to 40% (the Planner counts a levain the same way, by its share of the total flour), his 70% water matches, and the Planner’s salt for Neapolitan-style dough is 3% unless you change it in Fine-tune.

Forkish adds a note on temperature: the warmer the starter’s overnight spot, the more lactic flavor in the crust, up to a point. Overdo it and the culture gets too alcoholic, with sharper, acetic flavors. In a warm house he mixes the starter with 75°F (24°C) water instead of 100°F.

Natural leavening or a yeast-assisted shortcut

Some methods use a levain mainly for flavor and let commercial yeast do part or all of the rising. They’re legitimate, but they aren’t the same as a naturally leavened dough, and the Planner doesn’t model them.

• Levain plus commercial yeast. Modernist Pizza calls this combination fermentation: the yeast speeds things up while the levain adds flavor and some leavening. They also suggest it for a levain that has become too sour: use less of it and add a little commercial yeast.
• Second-Chance Levain. Modernist Pizza’s use for leftover or overripe levain: freeze it, then use the thawed levain for flavor while commercial yeast does the leavening. Follow a complete recipe for the amounts and the schedule; frozen levain isn’t a dependable leavener on its own.

If it goes wrong

• The dough barely moves. Check the levain before blaming the dough: if it didn’t float or hadn’t expanded, it was too young or too old. A cool room also slows every stage.
• It’s too sour. Use the levain younger, closer to its feed, and keep its overnight spot cooler.
• It collapsed or went slack. See over-proofed pizza dough, which separates dough you can still bake from dough you shouldn’t.

For the other kinds of preferment, and how a poolish compares, see poolish, biga and preferments.

Sources

• Nathan Myhrvold and Francisco Migoya, Modernist Pizza (2021), volume 1: page 297 (commercial yeast or levain in pizzerias), pages 298–299 (preferments, combination fermentation and the purist view), pages 302–303 (levain microbiology and why to use one), pages 304–307 (liquid levain, signs of ripeness, acidity, feeding and the float test) and page 310 (Second-Chance Levain).
• Ken Forkish, The Elements of Pizza (2016), chapter 6: the chapter introduction, the wild yeast (levain) culture, and the Overnight Levain Pizza Dough.
• Bryan Ford, “Sourdough Pizza Crust”, King Arthur Baking: levain build, bulk rise, 24- to 48-hour cold retard and warm-up. Checked October 14, 2026.