Learn how to make this easy discard sourdough pizza crust. It only has four basic ingredients, no kneading or rising required. You really can’t get much simpler than this delicious pizza crust recipe.
Pizza is a family favorite and some of our favorite kinds include chicken Alfredo pizza and easy breakfast pizza. While I love making our sourdough pizza dough recipe when I have the time, sometimes we need something super quick and delicious on the table. That is where this discard sourdough crust recipe comes in handy!
All you need is sourdough starter, Italian seasoning, salt and a little bit of olive oil and you are left with a delicious crispy crust that is ready in no time at all. No need to roll out dough, clean up after a floured work surface or wait for hours while your dough rises. It is the perfect recipe for busy days and the options for how you can use it are endless.
Top your crust with fresh thinly sliced tomatoes, cheese, and your favorite pizza toppings like fresh basil and pepperoni. Serve it alongside a fresh salad with homemade kefir ranch and a glass of fermented lemonade for the perfect lunch or dinner, ready in minutes!
Why You’ll Love This Recipe
Easy – This sourdough discard pizza crust recipe is as easy as spreading some starter in a preheated cast iron pan with some seasonings and olive oil. It really is as simple as it gets!
Sourdough discard – I’m a big fan of sourdough discard recipes. And if you make a lot of sourdough bread like I do, you probably have some discard on hand. This is a great way to use that jar of sourdough discard, plus I love the sourdough flavor that is featured in this crust.
Versatile – This thin crust is the perfect base to fill with your favorite toppings for your next homemade pizza night. It is a great meal for picky eaters since you can adjust the fillings to your family’s preferences.
Ingredients
Fed sourdough starter or discard – You can use unfed sourdough starter or active and bubbly starter. Most of the time I just pull my sourdough starter right out of the fridge and use it. If you are new to sourdough, check out this post to learn how to make your own sourdough starter.
Italian Seasoning – The Italian seasoning is optional, but it adds the delicious Italian flavor that we all love and come to expect on pizza.
A full ingredient list with exact amounts can be found in the recipe card below.
How to Make Discard Sourdough Pizza Crust
Step 1: Preheat a pizza stone, or cast iron skillet, to 425 degrees.
Step 2: When the oven is preheated, and the pans are scorching hot, take them out of the oven. Drizzle your baking vessel (stone or skillet) of choice with a little extra virgin olive oil.
Step 3: Ladle sourdough starter onto the hot pan.
Step 4: Spread it out until you have a nice thin layer in the size you want.
Step 5: Hit it with another drizzle of olive oil. Sprinkle it with salt and Italian seasoning. It will already start to bake when it makes contact with the pan. This is totally good and expected.
Step 6: Pop it back in the oven, until crispy, and easily pulls up from the pan. About 10 minutes.
Step 7: Remove the crust from the skillet (if using a skillet) and add to a baking sheet. Add your favorite sauce and toppings. Pop it back into the oven.
Step 8: Bake another 8-10 minutes or until the cheese is bubbly. Slice and enjoy!
Note On Avoiding a Soft Crust
There is one downside to this impossibly easy sourdough discard pizza crust. You can’t pour regular pasta/pizza sauce on it without it getting soft, even when it is nicely browned before you add the sauce. There are a few options you can go with to get the best results out of your crust.
- Option One: Thinly slice fresh tomatoes. Spread them out in a thin layer on your baked sourdough pizza crust, and drizzle with olive oil, salt and pepper. Put it in the oven and roast for about 10 minutes. Add the other toppings and cheese. We especially enjoy this option in the summer, when the garden is bursting at the seams with fresh tomatoes. Something about roasted tomatoes!
- Option Two: Make a homemade cream sauce with cheese, cream, garlic, and salt. Spread it on the crust and top with chicken, mushrooms, and cheese to make a chicken Alfredo pizza. This is just about our favorite meals of all time and really is one of the best pizzas ever.
- Option Three: Just add the tomato sauce and eat it a little soft. We do this often and it still tastes great.
Tips
- This recipe is super simple because it utilizes sourdough starter (active or discard); the downside is you can’t use a regular pan. You must use a cast iron or pizza stone.
- The secret to cooking this recipe is preheating the stone or cast iron skillet.
- Chop up your veggie toppings while the stone or cast iron is preheating. Then sauté your veggies and/or meat while the crust is cooking, because the crust will be basically done cooking after the first bake.
Recipe FAQs
You can’t use a normal pizza pan, because the liquid starter would stick to it. You would have quite the mess on your hands. Cast iron and pizza stones are wonderfully nonstick, when preheated. Plus, this ability to preheat a pan that is so heavy is what makes for a crispy crust. The way that it starts baking upon contact makes a crispy crust like no ordinary aluminum pizza pan ever could.
It tastes a lot like regular pizza crust, but the crust itself has a delicious, slightly tangy flavor that you would expect from sourdough.
Yes! Sourdough pizza crust can be stored in the freezer in an airtight container for up to 3 months. Bake it first and then let it cool.
Allow it to thaw in the fridge just a few hours before needing it. When you want to make pizza, just preheat your oven to 450 degrees, take out the sourdough pizza crust, top it with your favorite toppings and then bake until everything is bubbly and melted.
Yes, as long as it is cooked. Using discard in recipes is an easy way to use up excess discard and a good way to eat fermented grains. For this recipe baking discard turns it into pizza crust. You can also bake discard and turn it into delicious homemade sourdough crackers.
Sourdough discard can stay fresh in the fridge for up to a week before it will need to be fed again or thrown away. Personally, I don’t throw away any sourdough because I use it in sourdough discard recipes like this one.
More Sourdough Recipes from the Farmhouse
- Sourdough English Muffins
- Sourdough Monkey Bread
- The Best Sourdough Pancakes
- Sourdough Skillet- Healthy One Pot Meal
- The Best Sourdough Tortillas
If you try this recipe and love it, I would love it if you could come back and give it 5 stars! Tag me on Instagram @farmhouseonboone.
Sourdough Discard Pizza Crust
Video
Equipment
- 1 12 inch Cast Iron Skillet (You can also use a pizza stone or any size cast iron skillet you'd like. Just remember that the size of the skillet or stone will alter how much discard to use.)
Ingredients
- 1 tsp Olive oil, Split in half – 1 tsp for the pan, 1 tsp for drizzling on top.
- 1.5 cups Sourdough discard, The amount you use will depend on how big your skillet or pizza stone is. I used a 12" cast iron skillet and scraped some of the starter up the sides.
- pinch Italian seasoning
- pinch Salt
Instructions
- Preheat a pizza stone, or cast iron skillet, on 425 degrees F.
- When the oven is preheated, and the pans are scorching hot, take them out of the oven.
- Drizzle your baking vessel (stone or skillet) of choice with a little extra virgin olive oil (about 1 teaspoon).
- Ladle sourdough starter onto the hot pan. Now, this is the part that will really bother my recipe-lovin, rule-abidin blog readers. I am not going to give you an amount. I can't. You just spread it out until you have a nice thin layer in the size you want. If you want to see how this looks, watch the video in the blog post.
- Hit it with another drizzle of olive oil (about 1 teaspoon).
- Sprinkle it with salt and Italian seasoning.
- It will already start to bake when it makes contact with the pan. This is totally good and expected.
- Pop it back in the oven, until crispy, and easily pulls up from the pan. About 10 minutes.
- Remove the crust from the skillet (if using a skillet) and add to a baking sheet. Add your favorite sauce and toppings. Pop it back into the oven.
- Bake another 8-10 minutes or until the cheese is bubbly.
Notes
- The amount of discard you use will depend on the size of your skillet or pizza stone. The amounts above are what I used for a 12″ cast iron skillet.
- You can use unfed sourdough starter or active and bubbly starter. Most of the time I just pull my sourdough starter right out of the fridge and use it. If you are new to sourdough, check out this post to learn how to make your own sourdough starter.
- The Italian seasoning is optional, but it adds the delicious Italian flavor that we all love and come to expect on pizza.
- This recipe is super simple because it utilizes sourdough starter (active or discard); the downside is you can’t use a regular pan. You must use a cast iron or pizza stone so it doesn’t stick.
- The secret to cooking this recipe is preheating the stone or cast iron skillet.
- Chop up your veggie toppings if using while the stone or cast iron is preheating. Then sauté your veggies and/or meat while the crust is cooking, because the crust will be basically done cooking after the first bake.
- There is one downside to this impossibly easy homemade sourdough pizza crust recipe. You can’t pour regular pasta/pizza sauce on it without it getting soft, even when it is nicely browned before you add the sauce. See the post for a note on how to avoid this.
Nutrition
Nutrition information is automatically calculated, so should only be used as an approximation.
This was beyond easy and the best homemade pizza I have ever had! I was feeling guilty having so much discard, which means I was hoarding starter. What better use of your discard?
Check out my blog for tons of discard recipes!
I made this recipe with my GF sourdough discard last night – what a great use for discard! I don’t have a pizza stone and anyway I wanted to try using my steel deep-dish pizza pan. It did take quite a bit longer to bake the crust but I had no problems with it sticking because I put it in parchment paper. I also lightly powdered the paper with white rice flour. I didn’t manage to get my discard to go up at the edges since I didn’t use a preheated cast-iron pan, but otherwise it was fine. I used a base layer of roasted Roma tomatoes instead of putting the pizza sauce directly on the crust. I sautéed mushrooms, onions and zucchini, mixed a small amount of pizza sauce in with the vegetables before I layered them on the baked crust and sliced tomatoes. I also put some sliced black olives on it along with some sliced chicken-apple sausages and Italian-flavored, dairy-free mozzarella over it all. Next time I will use regular mozzarella on part of it for my husband. 😄 But otherwise, it turned out surprisingly well for a first try. In the future, I will bake the crust until it is firm and then take it out of the pan (by pulling it up by the edges of the parchment paper) and put it on a pizza screen and then continue baking it to get a crispier crust.
I make this for lunch and was amazed how good it was the I started thinking. I now make this with just little EVO and different seasoning. Let it cool and use it for dipping bread for things like crab or spinach dip, salsa, chili. Quick snack for kids and company.
My go to for a quick yummy pizza. I have found if I bake the crust earlier in the day, and then bake the pizza later, I don’t get the soggy crust! Love the thin crust but kind of deep dish, style when I use my cast iron skillet!
Finally got around to trying this recipe and it was simple & a hit! First time I didn’t have pizza sauce so I was going to make do with olive oil for the “sauce” but I forgot it before adding the cheese. Still was delicious without a sauce! I made it today for lunch in a mini cast iron for a little personal pizza for my 5 year old and she requested seconds. Definitely will keep this in the rotation.
Hey Lisa,
First off, I love all your recipes!
Second, I have discovered two ways to sauce this pizza that don’t make it mushy. One is to add the sauce (I do a pretty thin layer of just some crushed tomatoes but I’m sure pizza sauce would work) on top of the discard and crisp up the crust with the sauce. It isn’t perfect but the crust holds its structure a little better this way.
The other way, and my personal favorite way to make this pizza, is to use dehydrated tomatoes. During the summer when cherry tomatoes are abundant, I slice them in half and dehydrate them. Once dehydrated, I store them in a mason jar as is. To use them as a “sauce” for this pizza I blend a handful or two into powder and sprinkle before adding the cheese and toppings. This powder is also an awesome way to add a huge flavor punch to soups, a little goes a long way!
I hope this helps!
Chelsa
I made cheese and sausage pizza. I read about the soggy crust issue and so I made my sauce thicker. Yes it was still soggy. But YUM!!! Very nice flavor. Very nice outer crust. And easy. This will be my go to crust from now on.
Hi, sounds like a great way to ‘sauce’ this sourdough discard pizza Thank you for the tips. When you say you sometimes ‘crisp’ the discard with a thin layer of sauce on it, do you mean that during your original bake of the discard the sauce is already on it? Or do you do a later bake to crisp the baked crust with the thin layer of sauce, before you add your other toppings and do your final bake?
Great fast and easy pizza! And delicious!
I flipped it over after baking the crust, and then added a little sauce and toppings. It was definitely less soggy.
I used my stainless steel pans (they are rated oven-safe to 800F) and it worked great! I accidentally forgot to put some oil in my first pan before dumping starter on and hoped for the best. It was easier to spread and released from the pan easier so I think I’ll skip the oil before starter every time. Thank you for sharing your wisdom!!!
So good and sooo easy! I sprinkled grated (real) Parmesan over the crust before adding the tomato sauce and it didn’t get soggy:)