(Experiment 98) Pizza with Biga

This is part two of the pre-fermented pizza series. Biga is a dry pre-fermentation, while poolish is much wetter. Once again, credit goes to Vito Iacopelli for the original method. This is my easy-to-follow transcript of it, with a bit of extra guidance layered on top from my own attempts.

Fair warning: this is not a beginner’s dough. It’s quite wet, and it takes some practice before you can really get a feel for handling it properly.

So what actually separates the two? Visually, biga comes out more puffy and open. Texture-wise, I find poolish gives a softer crumb, while biga has more chew to it. The flavor from a biga-based dough reminds me of sourdough, deep and rich. Personally, I lean toward pizza made with poolish, mostly because I prefer that softer bite.

To get started, you’ll need to make the biga 48 hours in advance.

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(Experiment 98) Pizza with Biga

Ingredients

Biga

• 50 g water room temperature
• 100 g flour Tipo00
• 2.5 g active dry yeast

Main

• 200 g water room temperature
• 250 g flour Tipo00
• 7.5 g sea salt
• biga all you made above

Instructions

Biga

• Mix with hands gently, the goal is not to form a ball, just make sure flour is mixed with the water and there are no flour clumps anymore. Put in an airtight container for 48 hr in the fridge

Main

• Put water in the stand mixer , add the biga and break it with your hands or mixer. This will make the water milky
  
• Add 50% of flour while mixing
• Add the salt
• Add remaining flour
• Mix for ~10-15 mins
• Put on the countertop and flip over on itself a couple of times, you can do so by grabbing it in the middle on each side ( it should naturally flap over ) .
• When smooth, Make a big ball
  
• Cover for 30 mins ( I re-used my kitchen bowl )

  NOTE: The dough should be very sticky
• Reflip on itself, redo the huge ball, cover back for 10 mins
  
• It’s now time to make balls
• Make sure to preserve the top portion from the big ball when you cut it to make smaller balls. Put a bit of flour in an airtight container, drop balls put a little bit of flour on top of balls, cover, and do a final rise 2 hours at room temperature. If you have extra balls you won’t use, put them in an airtight container and throw them in the fridge, following day, let it rise a tad more than 60 minutes at room temperature.
• You can now stretch and bake !