I have a recipe for a pizza dough, that was originally with yeast (500g flour and 300ml water). I tried to make it twice now with sourdough. I took a bit of starter, mixed it with a 50-50% flour-water mix, let that rest for around 10 hours and than took 160g of this mix and figured since it's 80g flour and 80ml water, I now only need 420g flour and 220ml water. Now this sounded like a good plan, but both times the dough was a bit too wet and sticky compared to what I used to get when I just did the original 500g-300ml with yeast, so I ended up adding a bit more flour to the dough. Is this normal or am I not getting something here?
Dough – switching yeast to sourdough
sourdoughyeast
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I don't think you're doing anything wrong, I think the dough is just more slack than you're used to. As @Jay noted, it can take some practice to work with a wet dough. But once you do, you'll be rewarded with a much more open crumb and a better final product. In my experience, I've found wetter dough and higher oven temps = better artisan bread (in general).
The recipe appears to assume the reader is familiar with the process, but does offer some hints. She talks about scraping the dough out onto the work surface, then stretching-and-folding.
The recipe isn't as wet as the ciabatta I'm making below, but the process will be similar, so I hope this is helpful. I start by putting a bed of flour down, then scraping the blob of wet dough out onto it.
Then comes the stretch-and-fold part, which is just as it sounds. Using a wet pastry scraper and/or wet hands, just get under one edge, lift and pull it away, then plop it back on top of the main dough blob. Then do the same with the other side. Cover with plastic wrap and walk away. There's no process of kneading like you're used to. This photo is after a few stretch-and-folds at 20-minute intervals (I think!), and you can see the dough has started to smooth out and become cohesive.
By the time you're ready to shape, the dough should be a lot more cohesive and easier to deal with. I folded mine into little slippers and put them on a couche to rise.
Add 500 degrees and a baking stone, and I'm rewarded with an open and gelatinized crumb, and a nice crisp crust.
You can easily replace the liquid in most bread recipes with beer. This can have a very pronounced effect on your final dough as there is a lot more chemical and biological fun happening in beer than there is in water. In my experience, the dough with beer will usually rise faster than a similar dough with water. Generally, the flavor difference won't be that pronounced (usually a much more "bready" flavor, unless you use a beer that otherwise has a strong flavor, such as an IPA).
The acidity of the beer won't actually have that much of an effect on your final dough as the ph will be a weighted average of all of your ingredients.
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Best Answer
Sourdough doughs behave somewhat differently from those made with only baker's yeast. It's hard to predict, but the combination of acid produced in the sourdough and other components can make things weird, particularly during long fermentations with sourdough. Studies have shown that sourdough fermentation breaks down various components in the dough chemically in a different way from fermentation with baker's yeast.
I made pizza dough with sourdough starter a number of times, but I've stopped doing it because I found it so unpredictable (as I used a longer fermentation dough). Yes, it often turned out more sticky for the same level of hydration. Stretching it was also unpredictable too. Too much acid, and your gluten will break down, allowing the dough to tear much more easily. I think this may be related to the "stickiness" issue as well. I've had pizza crusts literally rip apart on the way into the oven when I was trying to unload them from the peel. I've had holes appear during unloading with regular baker's yeast, but I've never had straight ripping apart as I've had on a couple different occasions with sourdough.
Anyhow, I don't want to make this answer about me, and I know I could modify the technique to make sourdough pizza more workable. (Lots of people make sourdough pizzas successfully; I was just trying to maximize flavor a little too much.) My point is that from my experiments with it, the dough behaved very differently, even with the exact same recipe, with the same hydration and other proportions.