Sourdough Focaccia

I’m working on gradually expanding my sourdough repertoire. This week I made focaccia. You can certainly make focaccia with active dry yeast, but I’m not concerned with trying to make things faster. Though for sourdough this recipe is pretty quick! I made it from combining elements of a few recipes and changing the ferment times to fit my time constraints. If you have an active starter ready for baking, you can have this ready to eat in six hours.

You’ll need:

160 grams of active starter

450 grams of all purpose flour

350 grams of water (more or less depending on your humidity)

8 grams of salt

1 tbsp olive oil (and extra for coating pan and drizzling)

toppings of choice (we used homegrown rosemary and flake salt!)

Timing & Method:

Once you have your starter bubbling and ready to work (I had to feed mine the night before I started this), you can mix your dough. Combine starter, water, flour, salt, and 1tbsp of olive oil. Leave to ferment for a total of four hours – doing two stretch and folds within that time. I recommend using wet hands to handle this dough. It shouldn’t be runny, but it is very moist and sticky. After the four hour ferment, add enough olive oil to a 9×13 pan to coat the bottom. Place the dough in the pan and gently encourage it to stretch to the sides and corners, but don’t force it. Cover with a tea towel and let it sit for one hour. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. After the final ferment, drizzle some olive oil on the dough and poke into it with your fingers. This is what helps create all the divets and bubbles in focaccia. Add toppings. And bake for 45 minutes.*

*I used a ceramic casserole dish. If I was going to use a metal pan I would possibly have used higher heat and the timing may have been slightly less.