I am not going to stand on a pinstagram pedestal and tell you baking homemade pizza on Friday nights will make you a better person, parent, or friend.
It would be an über hip move to not make homemamde pizza and instead, place a David Chang- inspired order from Domino’s (thin crust, alfredo sauce, bacon, onions, extra side of please don’t tell me how their “cheese” is made).
But if you like making things that are relatively easy and taste delicious; and washing sticky pizza dough off your hands under hot soapy water; and if you’d like to feed yourself something that is good for your tummy and fills it with properties that build your immune system and makes your body a better place to live; then I have a suggestion for you.
Sourdough pizza night.
We have ours every other Friday. Because, every other week, my boys are at their second home, with dad.
We started hosting pizza night in January 2021. I asked my friend Hannah to section off a wedge of her starter. That was when we weren’t seeing people outside our bubble, when we were prime to welcome a predictable routine into our home that made me feel some semblance of control, when Minnesota was very cold and the sidewalks were too icy to safely walk down. I read somewhere that embracing this season is called “wintering” and this year I am determined to act it out by doing things like building fires, taking bubble baths, wearing wool socks, making turmeric and ginger tea and taking up cross country skiing.
And making sourdough pizzas.
If you would have asked me a year ago if I was going to assign a label for a type of food to a day of the week, I would have rolled my eyes. Terms like “Taco Tuesday” and “National <insert food here> Night” irk me for some reason and I suppose that makes me sound like a bit of an jerk.
But pizza Friday is where it’s at.
Sourdough is a living thing that needs to be fed in order to stay alive. Much like human beings and friendships. It becomes stronger and better with age. Our sourdough lives in a glass mason jar, in the side door of our refrigerator. It has a screw-on silver lid with lines of copper rust marks on the rim. The edges of the jar lip are crusted with a glue-like paste that has, over the course of many feedings, formed from flour and water spills.
Once a week, sometimes every two weeks — because life and lapses in memory, or simply because some weeks, I don’t really care — I feed our sourdough starter. Maybe an earlier version of me would have plugged a reminder in my calendar for a weekly feeding, and then called myself a failure if I forgot. A more lax approach works better for me now. If it happens; great. If it doesn’t; that works too. I think right now we could all use a little more grace. Especially towards ourselves.
I scoop most of the starter out from the jar, and save the discard for pizza dough. I drop one cup of flour and half a cup of water back in the jar and mix everything together, using a large fork to scrape down the sides. I use a heritage grain flour blend from a local mill. Even if it’s just a placebo effect, I like to believe it gives our sourdough a little more funk. Over time, the active wild yeast that grows in the jar ferments and makes tiny bubbles, lifting the dough up, so it rises vertically, reaching for the lid.
I measure 100 grams of our fridge starter and dissolve it in 375 grams of water. Then I add 500 grams of flour and 10 grams of salt, and stir it all in a plastic bowl using a wooden spoon. I stretch and fold the dough every half hour, leaving it to rest in between. I do this four times, before clamping a plastic lid over the top and letting it rise on the counter overnight. The next morning, after the dough has doubled in size, I portion it out to individual balls, scooping each one out with my hands, rolling it into a sticky ball in my palms. I put the balls of pizza dough into plastic quart containers. I stack the pints on top of one another, two pints tall each, and store them in the freezer. We usually have anywhere from seven to ten containers of pizza dough in the freezer at any given time.
On Friday afternoon, I take the containers out and set them on our countertop. An hour before I’m ready to bake them, I turn the oven on to 550 degrees and heat our red ceramic pizza stone that has, over the last year, been stained with welts and charcoal marks from pizzas baked of the past. I sprinkle semolina flour on sheets of parchment paper, then pull and stretch each ball of dough into misshapen circles and gently lay them on top.
My oldest son prefers pepperoni. My younger two want cheese. I use a combination of shredded and pearl mozzarella on their pizzas, and, most of the time, canned pizza sauce. The old me would have made sauce from scratch. The current me understands that sometimes cutting corners doesn’t cheapen your work. This summer, I sprinkled thyme leaves from our garden over the layer of sauce on the dough, underneath the cheese so my boys couldn't say what are those green leaves they look different I am not going to eat them.
I always make a pizza for myself, too. I get to build it using whatever I want and I usually throw together something using what we have in the fridge. I lean on stinky cheeses, or different pairings of heat and sweet. Last Friday I used spicy olive oil as my base. I made it using red pepper flakes, scallions, and cloves of smashed garlic; added crumbled feta; sun gold tomatoes cut in half, laying facedown in the dough; a handful of thinly sliced kale; and a drizzle of honey. And sea salt flakes, of course. Maldon should go on everything.
We eat our pizzas seated at high-top stools around the wooden island in our kitchen that has been stained with maple syrup spills and Sharpie pens and speared with the prongs of forks. Sometimes, on weekends when I don’t have the boys, when I need to occupy my time with a task I can see from start to completion, I wipe off the marker and the fork marks using toothpaste and steel wool, knowing it’s just a matter of days until they reappear.
Pizza Friday makes me feel warm and in control and safe in this climate of uncertainty and chaos. I can choose to read less news. I can choose to focus on what is good. I can choose to tune out distraction or noise. On Friday nights I can turn on Nina Simone or Stan Getz and watch my 5-year-old sway back and forth to the beat, I can listen to a story about how my 11-year-old wants the celebrate the owner of a local restaurant as an unsung hero for sending the money he makes back to his hometown, or try to answer my 6-year-old’s questions about what “God” means. I get to do this all over warm slices of thin, crusty pizza topped with ooey gooey cheese.
Now that normal-ish life has resumed and activities are trickling back into calendars, I am trying to live somewhere between saying yes to staying busy, often accepting invitations to things I wish I would have said no to in the first place — (my therapist would call this boundaries work) — and saying yes to being at home. “Wintering” with my family. Eating sourdough pizza in our pajamas on Friday nights, watching movies, making a big ol’ mess.
love everything about this post. Thank you. xo