Easy Whole Wheat Thin Crust Pizza made with Sourdough Discard

Satisfy your pizza cravings and use up some of that excess sourdough “discard” in the process! This whole wheat thin crust pizza is the perfect base for all your favorite pizza toppings and delivers a healthy bit of fiber as well.

It’s a drizzly Saturday in July. After my son and I visited the farmer’s market this morning where they were serving up lots of wood-fired pizza, I was craving pizza big time. Lately I don’t allow myself to eat much pizza. Because carbs. Especially empty carbs. I do have a wonderful recipe for a whole wheat cracker style pizza crust that I really love, but that’s not what I wanted today.

Today I wanted some yeasty goodness. So I went a-searching for recipes. I found this one from Fork Freedom that promised to be easy and quick. Except she used instant fast-rising yeast in her recipe. Not something I have on hand. I’m more of a sourdough and active dry yeast kinda girl.

So I simply adapted her recipe to add sourdough starter from my fridge (what most people refer to as “discard”) and just a bit of active dry yeast. I figured this would require some rise time, but I had a project to tackle around the house. So I started up the dough, set it in my oven to rise. And went about rewiring the lighting in my laundry room. Which should have been a quick project. But it didn’t turn out that way. Thus my pizza dough had plenty of time to rise.

Fixing the Light in the Laundry Room

Those of you who don’t want to hear about the hilarity of our laundry room lighting “adventure” can skip right on over this section. But there were lots of mishaps along the way, which were frustrating at the time. But in the end, we got a good laugh over them.

You see, we have a flourescent light fixture in our laundry room. And it’s been quite fine for the last 10 years or so, but just lately the bulbs burned out. We went shopping for replacement bulbs. Being eco-conscious citizens, we wanted LED lightbulbs. We couldn’t find any T10s at our nearest store, so we drove all the way across town to Home Depot. Alas, they didn’t have any T10s either. But we figured out we could get T8s. So we picked up some that looked good and headed home.

Much to our surprise, we discovered these new bulbs required re-wiring the fixture. Not exactly what we wanted to do, but hey, here we are. I do have a degree in electrical engineering. So yes, I’m qualified to do simple light fixture rewiring. I wired up my daughter’s lamp to an extension cord from the garage. And went downstairs to turn off the laundry room breaker. Except I quickly discovered that the light fixture was still live when I touched one of the wires.

Another Trip to the Hardware Store

At this point, my son stepped in to say we should head over to our nearest hardware store and get something to test it. Okay, it wouldn’t hurt to have a multimeter on hand. You’d think an electrical engineer turned food blogger would have such a thing on hand. But no, we don’t. So off we went. We debated over which thing was the right device, but eventually settled on one and brought it home.

This digital multimeter is the most pathetic excuse of a device I have ever had the misfortune to own. My son opened up the little panel to put in the batteries only to discover a solid plastic red panel. What the heck? We had to download a PDF off their web site to discover we had to remove the outer coating and completely disassemble the damn thing (using a tiny screwdriver, no less) just to put the batteries in.

However, it did tell us that yes, the wire is indeed live. And we were able to determine that you have to turn off the breaker to the kitchen lights to get the power to that fixture turned off. There were more shenanigans required to finish it up, but finish it up we did. FINALLY we have lighting in our laundry room! Why are home projects so ding dang hard?

Now Back to this Whole Wheat Thin Crust Pizza

After the laundry room fiasco, we went for a walk in the rain because that sounded nice. By then I was STARVING. It’s a good thing this pizza is much easier than a light fixture to put together. No trips to the hardware store, hurrah! Since the crust is so thin, there’s no transporting the crust from one thing to another. So you really do need a pizza pan. My crust was so big once I rolled it out that it filled my large 14 inch pan. And this was just half the dough!

My thin crust pizza baked up beautifully. I was so excited to devour it. I really like the chew and flavor of this simple whole wheat pizza crust. I love that it provides a good bit of fiber as well. The thin crust also gives the toppings more of a chance to shine. But still, with the fiber in the crust, I found it’s quite filling. After two pieces I was stuffed.

My Take on Sourdough Discard

So let’s talk about sourdough starter for a moment. Many people will tell you that you have to feed your sourdough starter to activate it before you bake with it. They claim that you must throw away perfectly good sourdough starter over several days to “activate” the starter.

This is why people talk about sourdough “discard”. Because of this wasteful, unnecessary idea that you must discard starter to activate it. I have not found any of that to be true or necessary. Sourdough is not anywhere near as crazy hard as people make it out to be. I find I can “activate” my starter by feeding it and letting it set for several hours at room temp. When the starter starts looks good and bubbly, it’s active. I always do this before I put my starter back in the fridge for next time.

I honestly do not “activate” my sourdough starter before I bake with it. And I never have. Even from my very early days of sourdough. However, from time to time, I do need to “exercise” my sourdough starter. By that I mean, feed it every few weeks or so. In that case, I need to use some if I haven’t baked any bread for a while. So I guess that’s where I can kind of agree with all of the discard-insistent people out there. If you have starter that needs exercising, it’s time to make something!

Recipe adapted from Fork Freedom

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