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Recipe
6 min read
Sourdough Pizza with Roasted Celeriac, Crispy Pancetta & Gruyère: The Autumn Bake That Tastes Like a Long Sunday
A deeply comforting autumn sourdough pizza with roasted celeriac, crispy pancetta and melted Gruyère. Full recipe, tips, and timing for home bakers.
Close-up of a delicious pepperoni pizza on a rustic wooden board, showcasing melted cheese and spices.The smell of celeriac roasting in olive oil on a Sunday afternoon is one of those quiet seasonal signals that summer is properly gone. It goes nutty and golden at the edges, and when it lands on a blistered sourdough base with salty pancetta and melted Gruyère, you get something that genuinely feels made for October. This is the kind of pizza you make when you want the kitchen to feel warm and the whole flat to smell incredible for a few hours.
Celeriac gets overlooked. It sits in the veg box looking a bit prehistoric while everyone reaches for squash and sweet potato. But roasted properly, it has this almost earthy sweetness that pairs brilliantly with the tang of a well-fermented sourdough base. The Gruyère melts into the crevices, the pancetta crisps up beautifully in the heat, and the whole thing comes together into a pizza that honestly does not need much else. A good active starter, a bit of planning, and you are in business.
Dough
- 400g strong white bread flour
- 100g tipo 00 flour
- 330g water, lukewarm
- 100g active sourdough starter
- 10g (2 tsp) fine sea salt
- 15g (1 tbsp) olive oil
Roasted Celeriac
- 400g celeriac, peeled and cut into 1cm cubes
- 2 tbsp olive oil
- 1 tsp fresh thyme leaves
- Flaky sea salt and black pepper
Toppings
- 150g Gruyère, coarsely grated
- 120g pancetta, cut into lardons
- 3 tbsp crème fraîche
- 1 clove garlic, finely grated
- Small handful of flat-leaf parsley, to finish
- Good olive oil, to drizzle
Baker's Tips
- Celeriac holds a lot of moisture. After roasting, spread it on a tray and let it sit for five minutes before it goes onto the base. Any excess steam will make the centre of your pizza soggy.
- Use a steel or stone if you have one, preheated for at least 45 minutes. The base needs that initial burst of direct heat to blister properly before the toppings overcook.
- If you are tracking this recipe or scaling it for a bigger batch, DoughRise Pro lets you save unlimited formulas and export your bake history as a PDF, which is genuinely useful once you start tweaking ratios across different flour blends.
METHOD
- Mix the dough. In a large bowl, combine the flours and water and mix until no dry flour remains. Leave to rest for 30 minutes. Add the active starter and olive oil, mix to combine, then add the salt and work it in thoroughly with your hands. The dough will feel a bit rough at this stage. That is fine.
- Strengthen the dough. Over the next two hours, perform four sets of coil folds roughly 30 minutes apart. By the end, the dough should feel noticeably more elastic and hold its shape when you lift it. Cover and leave at room temperature to ferment. In a cooler autumn kitchen (around 19–20°C), this will take 6–8 hours. Warmer and it will move faster, so keep an eye on it. You are looking for a dough that has grown by around 50–75% and has visible bubbles under the surface.
- Divide and shape into balls. Turn the dough onto a lightly floured surface and divide into two equal pieces. Shape each into a tight ball by pulling the dough underneath itself and creating surface tension. Place on a lightly oiled tray, cover loosely and rest at room temperature for at least one hour before shaping. If you want to push it overnight, put the dough balls in the fridge and take them out 90 minutes before you plan to bake.
- Roast the celeriac. Preheat your oven to 220°C fan. Toss the celeriac cubes in olive oil, thyme, salt and pepper, spread on a baking tray in a single layer and roast for 20–25 minutes until golden at the edges and cooked through. Remove and allow to cool slightly. Mix the crème fraîche with the grated garlic and a pinch of salt.
Why this works
Resting shaped dough balls before stretching allows the tension built during shaping to relax. When you try to stretch dough that has just been shaped, the network fights back and the base springs inward the moment you ease off. Give it time and the dough becomes far more cooperative, stretching to a thin, even round without tearing. In autumn, with a cooler kitchen, that resting window is more forgiving than it is in summer, which is one of the reasons this kind of pizza is actually easier to nail this time of year.
INTO THE OVEN
- Preheat your baking surface. Crank the oven to its highest setting (250°C or above if yours goes there) with your baking steel or stone inside. Leave it for a minimum of 45 minutes. This is not optional. The stored heat in the steel is what gives the base those blistered, leopard-spotted patches underneath.
- Stretch and top the pizzas. Flour your work surface generously. Take one dough ball and begin pressing it out from the centre with your fingertips, working outward, leaving a thicker rim around the edge. Once it is around 25–28 centimetres across, you can lift it and use your knuckles to stretch it gently. Transfer to a well-floured pizza peel or the back of a flat baking tray.
- Add the toppings. Spread half the garlic crème fraîche across the base, leaving the rim clear. Scatter half the Gruyère, then distribute half the roasted celeriac evenly. Finish with half the pancetta lardons scattered across the top. The pancetta will render and crisp directly on the pizza in the oven, so do not worry about pre-cooking it.
- Bake. Slide the pizza onto the preheated steel or stone and bake for 8–11 minutes, until the rim is puffed and charred in places, the cheese is bubbling and golden, and the pancetta is crisp. Every oven is different so check at the eight-minute mark. Remove carefully, scatter with fresh parsley, drizzle with a little olive oil, and leave it for two minutes before cutting. Repeat with the second dough ball.
Scaling this recipe up for a group? Use the free DoughRise Portioning Calculator to work out exact dough weights for however many pizzas you need, without the mental arithmetic mid-bake.
Happy baking! Find everything you need at doughrise.store
Photo by Horizon Content on Pexels
