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Recipe
6 min read
Sourdough Pizza with Cavolo Nero, Roasted Garlic & Taleggio: The Autumn Bake That Tastes Like the Season Changed Overnight
A deeply seasonal sourdough pizza with roasted garlic cream, cavolo nero and melted Taleggio. Rich, earthy, and exactly what autumn evenings call for.
Delicious wood-fired pizza topped with melting cheese on a rustic wooden board.The first time cavolo nero shows up at the market stall and the air has that particular damp, copper smell of September, something clicks and you start wanting heavier food again. Not stodgy, just... grounded. This pizza is exactly that: a roasted garlic cream base, leaves of cavolo nero that go a little crisp at the edges, and Taleggio that pools into every bubble on the surface like it was always meant to be there.
I made this for the first time on a Friday a couple of weeks back, half listening to a mix someone had sent me, the kind of evening where you are not really planning anything ambitious but the dough is ready and the fridge has the right things in it. It came out better than it had any right to, and I have been tinkering with the ratios since. This is the version worth writing down.
Dough
- 350g strong white bread flour
- 245g water, lukewarm
- 70g active sourdough starter (at peak)
- 8g (1.5 tsp) fine sea salt
- 10g (2 tsp) olive oil
Roasted Garlic Cream Base
- 1 whole head of garlic
- 150ml double cream
- A small pinch of white pepper
- A small pinch of fine sea salt
- A few sprigs of fresh thyme
Toppings
- 200g Taleggio, rind removed, torn into rough pieces
- 150g cavolo nero, stems stripped, leaves torn
- 2 tbsp olive oil (for the leaves)
- Flaky sea salt, to finish
- A squeeze of lemon juice, to finish
- Chilli flakes, optional
Baker's Tips
- Roast the garlic the night before if you can. It deepens the flavour and means the cream sauce comes together in five minutes flat when you actually need it.
- Cavolo nero needs a little oil and a confident hand before it goes on. Dress the torn leaves in olive oil and a pinch of salt so they wilt properly in the oven rather than just burning at the tips.
- If you are tracking multiple pizza dough formulas across different flours and batch sizes, DoughRise Pro lets you save unlimited formulas with your full bake history, which means you stop losing your best versions to a notes app you cannot find two weeks later.
METHOD
- Mix the dough. Combine the flour, water and active starter in a large bowl. Mix until no dry flour remains, then add the salt and olive oil. Squeeze everything together with your hand until it is fully incorporated. The dough will feel a little shaggy at this point. Cover and rest for 30 minutes.
- Build some structure. Over the next two hours, perform four sets of coil folds roughly 30 minutes apart. Wet your hands, slide them under the dough, lift the centre, and fold it over itself. Rotate the bowl 90 degrees and repeat four times per set. The dough should feel noticeably stronger and more elastic after each round. By the final set it should hold its shape rather than spreading flat.
- Bulk ferment at room temperature. Cover the bowl and leave the dough to ferment for another 4–5 hours at around 20–22°C, or until it has grown by roughly 50–70% and looks domed and airy. In a cooler kitchen (typical for September in most British homes) this might push towards the 6-hour mark, and that is completely fine.
- Roast the garlic. While the dough is fermenting, slice the top off the garlic head, drizzle with olive oil, wrap loosely in foil, and roast at 180°C fan for 40–45 minutes until completely soft. Squeeze the cloves into a small saucepan, add the double cream, thyme, salt and white pepper, and warm over a low heat for about 5 minutes, stirring and breaking the garlic down as you go. You want a loose, spoonable cream rather than a thick sauce. Set aside to cool.
- Divide and rest. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and divide into two equal pieces (around 340g each). Shape each piece into a tight ball using a bench scraper and your palm, then place on a floured tray or plate, cover with a damp cloth, and leave to rest for 45 minutes to an hour at room temperature. This rest is genuinely important , the structure relaxes and the balls become much easier to open without tearing.
- Preheat the oven hard. Place your baking stone or a heavy baking tray in the oven and preheat at maximum temperature (typically 250–280°C fan) for at least 45 minutes. You want the stone genuinely blazing before anything goes near it. This is what creates the base char and lift that makes this pizza work.
- Prepare the cavolo nero. Tear the cavolo nero leaves into large, rough pieces, discarding the thick stems. Toss in 2 tablespoons of olive oil and a pinch of salt until every leaf is properly coated. Set aside.
- Stretch the bases. On a lightly floured surface, press the centre of a dough ball outward with your fingertips, leaving a slightly thicker rim. Then pick the disc up and let gravity do the work, rotating it slowly between your knuckles. Aim for roughly 28–30 centimetres across. Lay it on a well-floured pizza peel or the back of a flat baking tray.
- Dress and launch. Spread a generous tablespoon or two of the roasted garlic cream over the base, leaving the rim clear. Scatter Taleggio pieces over the cream, then pile on the dressed cavolo nero. Give the peel a little shimmy to check the dough moves freely before you slide it onto the stone. Bake for 10–12 minutes until the crust is deeply blistered and golden, the cheese is molten and just beginning to colour, and the cavolo nero has caught at the edges.
- Finish and serve. Pull the pizza from the oven, hit it with a squeeze of lemon juice, a pinch of flaky salt, and chilli flakes if you want a little heat. Slice and eat immediately. Repeat with the second base.
Why this works
The olive oil in this dough is doing more than adding flavour. Fat coats the developing structure and makes the dough more extensible, so when you come to stretch your bases, they cooperate rather than fighting back. It also slows the crust from drying out too fast under the grill, giving the Taleggio a chance to fully melt before the edges char.
INTO THE OVEN
Want to dial in this recipe for a bigger group or a different flour? Use the free DoughRise Baker's Percentage Calculator to scale the dough accurately without losing the ratios that make it work.
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Photo by Tako Tsiklauri on Pexels
