Focaccia, From Sourdough Starter
Chewy, crispy bread, baked in the richness of olive oil, and it’s vegan
Ever since Bread Week of The Great British Bake Off 2021, I’ve been trying to recreate the success I had making focaccia. You would think it would just be a matter of following the original recipe. But it wasn’t cut and dry.
During the magic of that first bake, I combined the written recipe with the visual cues from the Netflix special Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. My second attempt just followed the written recipe … and was very disappointing. Turns out, the written recipe misses some of methods depicted in the show. And there are some ingredients that are in conflict between the two depictions.
So I set about developing my own, comprehensive instructions.
Further, I didn’t just want a delicious bread that I could achieve with consistent results — I mean, that was the primary goal, but let’s go big or go home — I wanted a recipe that employed my sourdough starter and was vegan.
It’s been a long slog of trial and error to nail down this recipe. Thankfully, my co-workers were happy to eat all my experiments. For me it was about fine tuning the recipe. For them it was a matter of ooooh bread baked in olive oil, I’ll have some more of that.
