Learn how to make this easy sourdough discard 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.
Key Takeaways: Sourdough Discard Pizza Crust
- Prep Time: 2 minutes
- Bake Time: 20 minutes
- Total Time: 22 minutes
- Servings: 8 slices
- Cook Method: Baked on a preheated cast iron skillet or pizza stone
- Flavor & Texture: Thin and crispy with a lovely sourdough tang.
- Difficulty: Super easy! There are only four basic ingredients that come together with minimal effort.
- Why this Recipe? This recipe is easy, versatile, and uses up sourdough discard, which is perfect for the home sourdough baker.
Chicken Alfredo pizza and easy breakfast pizza are some of our favorite repeat meals around the homestead. 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.
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!
Table of Contents
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 as I do, you probably have some discard on hand. Check out my collection of sourdough discard recipes for even more ways to use up this plentiful ingredient!
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. 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 Sourdough Discard Pizza Crust
Step 1: Preheat a pizza stone or cast-iron skillet to 425 degrees Fahrenheit.
Step 2: When the oven is preheated and the pans are scorching hot, take them out of the oven. Drizzle your baking vessel 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. It will start baking as soon as it makes contact with the pan. This is totally normal and expected.
Step 5: Drizzle some olive oil over the top. Sprinkle it with salt and Italian seasoning.
Step 6: Pop it back in the oven until crispy and pulls away easily 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 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 bake for about 10 minutes. Add the other toppings and cheese. We especially enjoy this option in the summer, when the garden is bursting with fresh 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 meal of all time and really is one of the best pizzas ever.
- Option Three: Just add the tomato sauce (try my homemade marinara recipe) and eat it a little soft. We do this often, and it still tastes great.
Lisa’s Expert Tips
- 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.
- Switch up your cheeses for some fun flavors. While a classic pizza with homemade mozzarella is delicious, I love to add some homemade ricotta or even homemade cream cheese for a dessert pizza!
Sourdough Discard Pizza Crust 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 a few hours before you plan to bake it. When you want to make pizza, preheat your oven to 450 degrees Fahrenheit, take out the sourdough pizza crust, top it with your favorite toppings, and bake until everything is bubbly and melted.
Yes, as long as it is cooked. Using sourdough 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. You can learn more about how to store sourdough starter in this post.
More Delicious Recipes from the Farmhouse
- Sheet Pan Gnocchi With Chicken And Vegetables
- Easy Buffalo Chicken Salad Recipe
- Easy And Delicious Beef Taco Skillet
- Easy Tomato Galette with a Buttery Crust
- 10 of the Best Instant Pot Recipes
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.
Quick Sourdough Discard Pizza Crust Recipe
Video
Equipment
- 1 12 inch Cast Iron Skillet or Pizza Stone
Ingredients
- 2 teaspoons olive oil, 9 grams (Split in half – 1 tsp for the pan, 1 tsp for drizzling on top.)
- 1 ½ cups sourdough discard, 375 grams (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 of Italian seasoning
- pinch of salt
Instructions
- Preheat a pizza stone or cast iron skillet to 425 degrees Fahrenheit.
- When the oven is preheated and the pans are scorching hot, take them out of the oven.
- Drizzle your baking vessel of choice with a little extra virgin olive oil (about 1 teaspoon).
- Ladle sourdough starter onto the hot pan.
- Spread it out until you have a nice thin layer in the size that you want.
- Hit it with another drizzle of olive oil (about 1 teaspoon).
- Sprinkle it with salt and Italian seasoning.
- It will start baking as soon as 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 baking, because the crust will be basically done baking 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:)