Learning About Using Milk Kefir in a Pizza

I have been trying milk kefir to leaven my pizza dough.  First I added the milk kefir directly to the other ingredients.  Now I am trying a poolish with milk kefir.  A classic poolish is the same amount of water (or milk kefir in these experiments) and flour added together until the poolish bubbles to a certain point.  Usually a poolish is left at room temperatures until the poolish comes to a point of what is called the break point or the bubbles start to recede.  A poolish will mature at different room temperatures at different times, all depending if you use a commercial yeast such as IDY, ADY, natural “wild yeast”, or even purchased wild yeast strains.  I had been experimenting Ischia starter before in making a pizza, also with a poolish.  I will explain about the Ischia starter in future posts.

So far using the milk kefir does leaven the dough, and although I did get some decent results in making a pizza and leavening the pizza dough, but I am still experimenting in seeing if I can get better results.  Understanding how to use milk kefir, in my opinion, is more difficult than using other kinds of starters.  The poolish using the milk kefir starter doesn’t behave like other methods in making a poolish.  Right now I just have to watch the poolish visually to see when I think it is ready to be incorporated into the final dough.  Even after incorporating the milk kefir poolish into the final dough can be tricky to know when the final dough is ready to be baked into a pizza.  I have a pH meter, that I had used at one time in a Fresh Salsa market stand I owned.  I am now taking the pH values to see if they can tell me when the dough might be ready to bake a pizza.  So far I can’t really say, this is a big help, but will continue to take the pH numbers at various times to see if they can help.

A milk kefir pizza is good, in my opinion.  It has the characteristics of a naturally leavened dough. I will follow up with posts on milk kefir in pizza dough, as I experiment more.

Norma