Sourdough Focaccia

The second best thing you can make with your sourdough starter.

Bread-eating is already a guilty pleasure and Focaccia is the mother of guilty pleasure when it comes to breads! Its loaded with olive oil and crunchy salt on top. The golden yet soft crust oozing oil with every bite is the perfect addition to any dinner or brunch spread.

You can of course make focaccia with regular yeast, I will post the recipe for it at some point. For now, I am saving my instant yeast for all my pav needs 😛 and using my sourdough starter for everything I can.

And this focaccia turned out so good, I might just always make it with my cherished sourdough starter 🙂 So, for this recipe, you will first need the sourdough starter, so if you dont have it, you can start one today and in a week’s time you can start baking (and enjoying) with it. Here’s the recipe for the starter and here’s my write up on everything you need to know about baking with your sourdough starter.

And now for the Sourdough focaccia recipe:

You will need:

380 g All purpose flour

75 g of activated sourdough starter

260 g of water

7 g salt

2-3 tbsp olive oil – including the bread, topping and greasing

A baking tray – this recipe fits a ~9X13 inch pan, that is 1+ inches deep. Increase/ decrease all the ingredients in direct proportion to the surface area of the pan. Make sure any tray that you use is at least 1 inch deep.

Toppings of your choice – crushed salt (sea salt flakes, smoked salt, kosher salt), fine chopped garlic, rosemary, cherry tomatoes, basil, olives, etc.

I used a combination of – kalamata olives, fresh rosemary, garlic and kosher salt.

Procedure:

• Mix the flour, water (save a little bit), starter and salt till it comes together. This has a very high hydration ration and the dough will be very liquid-y. Just rotate the bowl in all directions, and fold over the dough on itself, to incorporate all the water in it.

• If you think you can accommodate more water into the dough, add the little bit that you saved. You have to really push the limits here and add as much water as the dough can possibly hold.
• You can see in the pictures, that its almost flowable, but still holds shape – that’s the consistency you are looking for.
• Once all the water is incorporated, add a tablespoon of olive oil and continue folding over the dough in all directions, till you have a homogenous mass of dough will all the oil incorporated.

• At this stage, leave the dough to rest for 30 minutes covered – 1^st prove
• After 30 minutes, wet your hands for the stretch and fold so that the dough doesn’t stick to your fingers. stretch and fold the dough from all four directions over itself – 1^st stretch and fold

• let it rest covered for another 30 minutes -2^nd prove
• Stretch and fold one more time in all four directions – 2^nd stretch and fold
• let it rest covered for another 30 minutes – 3^rd  prove

• Grease the tray with a 1/2 tablespoon of olive oil
• Stretch and fold one more time in all four directions – 3^rd stretch and fold
• When you complete the last stretch and fold transfer the dough to your focaccia baking tray.

• Cover the tray with a dome of foil (so that it doesn’t stick to the cover) and let it rest for 30 minutes – 4^th prove
• Pat the dough and press it and stretch it towards the corners, you will not reach the corners in the first set of stretches. – 4^th stretch (no fold)
• Cover the tray back with the foil dome and let it rest for 30 minutes – 5^th prove
• Pat the dough and press it and stretch it towards the corners, you will not reach the corners completely, but will notice some progress. – 5^th stretch (no fold) – final stretching
• Cover the tray back with the foil dome and let it rest for 2-3 hours – 6^th prove – final proving before baking
• Check after two hours, give another hour if needed. The dough should have completely occupied the tray, corners covered! And the surface should be very bubbly – this is a sign its ready.
• Preheat oven to 450F ~203C
• Remove the fully fermented tray of the focaccia dough. Make holes by poking all your fingers in the sheet of dough, till they reach the bottom. Do this several times, till the entire surface is poked.

• Sprinkle another tablespoon of olive oil, some of it will sink in the holes
• Add toppings of your choice – I added about a tbsp of chopped garlic, rosemary sprigs, and sliced kalamata olives with a generous sprinkle of kosher salt.

• Slightly push the toppings into the dough, so they are ‘set’ in the dough
• Bake the bread for about 20-25 minutes.
• You do not need to add steam for this bread as it doesn’t need to have a crunchy crust 😊
• The top should have browned at the end of baking. If not, increase baking time by a few minutes as needed. If you are using a larger/ deeper tray, more volume of dough, you will need to bake longer.

Serve warm. This bread can be enjoyed as it or used for making sandwiches.

to a see a quick video of the procedure and how we enjoyed this bread at dinner, visit and follow my Instagram page @aperfectionistscookbook or my facebook page with the same name – A Perfectionist’s Cookbook.