Focaccia from Sour Starter

Heather Moore

3 min readMay 22, 2017

Let’s start at the end. Here’s the result of your soon-to-be-labor (process pics at bottom):

Ingredients for a large sheet pan (18x26 inches)

325g Levain @ 100% hydration
772g Bread Flour ~12% protein
545g Water
19g Salt
40g EVOO

Instructions

Levain:

I keep a sourdough starter in the fridge that I feed every 1–3 weeks. For this recipe, I took some of the refrigerated starter (~30g) and add 150g water and 150g flour to get just over the 325g of levain needed. I let this sit for several hours until it’s nice and bubbly. Sometimes I feed twice. The goal is really just to be sure it’s active before you use it, so feed until bubbly.

Dough:

Combine 772g flour and 545g water and let sit for 30 min. This is my nod to an autolyse period. If you have time, 60 min produces better results.
Add 325g Levain, mix in reasonably well and let sit for 20 min.
Add 40g oil and 19g salt. Mix in well.
Knead for 5 min. Dough will be very tacky.
Do 2 sets of stretch and folds at 15 min intervals. Dough is pretty handleable at this point.
Bulk ferment in fridge for a long time. This one was 19 hours. I’m pretty flexible about this depending on my schedule. 10–24 hours will do. For people with gluten sensitivity, longer seems to be better. I have friends with Hashimotos who can eat this bread.

Bake:

Remove from fridge, line pan with oiled parchment & shape into pan as much as you can without de-gassing it.
Let rest over an hour or two, proofing and slowly migrating toward the edges of the pan.
Rub with EVOO and sprinkle with salt. Press it with a clawed hand.
Bake for 10min at 450F/230C, then drop to 425F/220C for 20min. If any huge bubbles arise, snip them with scissors.