Soft & Bubbly Sourdough Focaccia Bread (beginner level)

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If you are just beginning your sourdough journey and need to acquire a starter, I’d be happy to share mine with you! You can ORDER Sourdough Starter HERE, cost is $12 and includes shipping.

Find more sourdough troubleshooting and tips weekly, here!

What makes sourdough focaccia special, and so delicious?

After starting my sourdough baking journey and feeling mostly confident in the vitality of my starter plus the resulting breads, it was time to experiment beyond the basic sourdough recipe. We love this sourdough pizza crust, english muffins, and the latest – sourdough focaccia.

Puffy and fluffy. Bubbly holes throughout. And a golden brown exterior that rose through the dimples left behind by pressing fingers into the dough, just before baking.

Experimenting with different techniques and water ratios, I settled on this recipe that encompasses a high hydration dough, and a lengthy, hands off bulk fermentation. In short, it looks like: stir dough, long rest & rise, a shorter rest & rise, dimple. Bake. DEVOUR.

There have been a few relatively inexpensive, well-engineered tools that I’ve added to my kitchen as I’ve dove head first into sourdough baking, beginning with my Everyday Sourdough Bread recipe. My Rye Sourdough is another favorite! These tools make certain steps much easier, and ultimately reproducible and accurate. You don’t need all of them right away if you’re just getting started, but the one you MUST have is a digital scale.

Why using a scale is important for sourdough baking:

The reason why using a scale is so important in sourdough is because volume doe not equal weight. For visualization purposes, 1 cup of water does not weigh the same as 1 cup of flour. The water would weigh a lot more than the flour, so when we’re looking to make recipes work, we want to make sure everyone is using the same measurement. Grams don’t lie! :)

Since sourdough baking is a game of ratios and percentages dictated by grams, you won’t be able to work without it. Using a digital scale is one of my top tips in my 5 Sourdough Starter Tips for Beginners.

Why did my sourdough focaccia turn out dense?

The dough should be at least an inch thick in your cake pan, before the final rise. After the final rise and the dough has doubled, this will give you sufficient dough to press your fingertips in, resulting in bubbly focaccia.

Not doing the stretch and folds could cause your focaccia to be flat and dense when you bake it. This kneading process develops the gluten structure. It will make the dough more soft and elastic. This elastic structure will help trap any air that is released by during the fermentation process.

Finally, if you overproof the dough, your focaccia will not rise, and turn out dense.

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Soft & Bubbly Sourdough Focaccia Bread

A delicious beginner recipe for homemade sourdough focaccia bread that is made with active sourdough starter. The soft, pillowy texture is incredible, and the bread gets lovely flavor from the olive oil and starter.

4.64 from 244 votes

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Prep Time :1 hour hour

Cook Time :25 minutes minutes

Wait Time :15 hours hours

Total Time :18 hours hours

Yield: 1 large loaf

Author: Amanda Paa

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Ingredients

• 115 grams [active starter] at its peak – NOT discard
• 350 grams slightly warmer than room temp water
• 175 grams all-purpose flour, preferably King Arthur brand
• 300 grams bread flour
• 10 grams fine sea salt
• olive oil
• 2 tablespoons melted butter
• 2 cloves garlic minced
• 2 teaspoons dried oregano

Instructions 

• In a large bowl, use a fork to whisk the starter with water until incorporated.
• Add flours and salt, and incorporate using hands and spatula. Put the bowl on your stand mixer and mix for about 1 minute on low speed, until there is no dry bits of flour. Cover bowl with towel and let sit for 30 minutes.
• Then mix on speed 4 of your Kitchenaid stand mixer for 7 minutes.

  It will be loose and WET, that's okay and exactly how it should be. This results in a light and airy finished bread. Drizzle 1 tablespoon olive oil evenly over dough. Let dough rest for 30 minutes with a damp cloth over the top of bowl.
• Now stretch and fold four “corners” of the dough, basically on top of itself, just like you would do normally when making sourdough. Do this 3 to 4 few times around the bowl (no resting in between). It will be a wet and sticky dough.
• Cover bowl and let rest several hours at room temperature until dough is just short of doubling, (using a straight sided vessel helps gauge growth SO much) has a few bubbles on top, has a glossy finish and is jiggly if you nudge the bowl. This usually takes another 5 hours if the temperature is around 72 degrees F in your house, quicker if temperature is warmer, longer if the temperature in your house is cooler. But how the dough looks is truly how you should tell when its done with bulk fermentation, rather than time.
• Brush a 7×11 or 9×13 non-stick cake pan (do not use glass) liberally with 1 1/2 tablespoons olive oil, distributing all the way to sides of pan.
• Using lightly oiled hands, gently scrape dough out into your cake pan. It will look like a big blob and be somewhat wet, and that’s okay! Using your hands gently stretch the the dough, leaving dough alone when it's about 1 inche tall. You don't want it to be thin. It will continue to spread out towards the edges of the pan as it goes through its final rise. Let rise in a warm spot, covered with a sheet pan that’s upside down (so it has room to rise) for about 1 1/2 to 2 hours until it is quite puffy, jiggly, airy, and has a few bubbles that look like they are on the surface. This amount of time will depend on how warm your house. Warmer will rise faster, cooler it will rise slower, so use the time given as an estimate.
• Preheat oven to 425 degrees F. Drizzle2 tablespoons olive oil (don't be shy) onto the top of the bread, rub some oil on your hands, and press your fingertips using your whole hand into the risen dough. Your fingertips should go all the way down through the dough, hitting the pan.
• Put pan in oven on middle rack and bake for 15 minutes. Remove and brush dough with melted butter, oregano, and chopped garlic if desired. Turn oven down to 400 degrees F and bake for another 10 minutes. If you aren't not adding the melted butter topping, do not turn down the oven and simply continue baking at 425 degrees for another 10 minutes. Let cool for 15 minutes and eat.

Notes

*This is a very WET DOUGH. And that’s okay! Be patient, it will come together. :)