Farm-to-Table Focaccia Using Sourdough Starter
Here’s my farm-fresh sourdough focaccia - before and after. ❤️💚 All the toppings - tomatoes, basil, onions & dried oregano - are from the garden. I got creative with our large-leaf Italian basil leaves and fresh red onions straight out of the ground. 😍 I couldn’t resist making flower patterns - flowers always, and always. Halved cherry tomatoes and dried basil and oregano from last year’s garden were sprinkled on top, along with a generous sprinkle of cracked black pepper and sea salt. It’s so fulfilling to know how local this is - even the sourdough starter is made with wild yeast started from scratch in our farmhouse kitchen. It was absolutely delicious! My girls really loved the thinner focaccia made on this cookie sheet, but next time I’ll also try making it in a cast iron skillet so it’s thicker.
After I did this trial run, I baked it in a cast iron the next time, and it was perfection. I’ll always bake it in cast iron moving forward.
SOURDOUGH FOCACCIA RECIPES
Here are the two recipes I’ve used for sourdough focaccia:
My friend Melissa’s Sourdough Discard Focaccia
Chelsea Young’s Sourdough Focaccia with active starter - this is the one I will keep using moving forward because I like using puffy, active starter
DRIED YEAST FOCACCIA RECIPES
If you don’t want to try sourdough starter, you can make focaccia with regular store-bought dried yeast. I previously shared the Farm-to-Table Focaccia I made from Samin Nosrat’s recipe using dried yeast, and it was great!
You can also sub your own sourdough starter for the dried yeast in a recipe using this ratio: 100g of sourdough starter = a 5-7g packet of commercial yeast. So a 1/2 tsp of dried yeast weighs approximately 1.4g. (Time to use proportions - this is why we learned simple algebra, friends!)
For all things sourdough, check out this post and podcast episode where I share the method and recipe I use for feeding sourdough, using the discard, and making bread.
