If you love making sourdough at home, then you’ll love this sourdough focaccia recipe! Fluffy, crispy, and brushed with garlic butter, this is going to be your new favorite sourdough bread recipe.

WHY I MADE THIS SOURDOUGH FOCACCIA

If you’ve spend about 30 seconds reading this blog, you’ll quickly learn that I have a thing for focaccia. My Rosemary Garlic Focaccia Muffins and Garlic Focaccia Bread recipes are both staples in my house, and I spend many of my waking moments thinking up new ways to make focaccia. Sourdough focaccia, of course, was the next recipe on the menu!

I’ve gotten REALLY into making sourdough bread at home lately (yes, about five years later everybody else), so naturally I wanted to see if there was a way to combine my love of focaccia and my newfound love of sourdough. And that’s why I tested and tested and tested this recipe to create the sourdough focaccia bread of my dreams.

If you dream of sourdough focaccia bread, then this recipe is for you, too. I love everything about it: it’s got a soft, chewy inside and a crispy, golden brown outside while also having that classic tangy taste that one can only get from sourdough.

In short, this recipe is pretty much perfect. I tested this recipe with different ratios of sourdough starter, water, and flour and the best result that I found is detailed in the recipe card below. Of course, your mileage may vary depending on the sourdough starter you use, but I’m confident that this base sourdough focaccia recipe will get make you your new favorite bread!

MY SOURDOUGH FOCACCIA RECIPE

If this is your first time making sourdough, buckle up.

If you’re experienced with making focaccia, then you should buckle up, too!

We’re going to combine the techniques used for both sourdough bread baking and focaccia bread making for this recipe. It really is the best of both worlds, which comes with its pros and cons, of course.

The pros: this sourdough focaccia bread is spectacular. It’s got a soft, chewy inside and that crispy, golden brown outside while also having that classic tangy taste that one can only get from sourdough. Few things in life are better than that!

The cons: this bread recipe takes a while to make. About two days, to be exact. The majority of that time, of course, is just the dough resting, but still. I get it. You want sourdough focaccia, and you want it now.

The biggest downside to making sourdough anything is that it requires patience. But the result will be worth it, trust me! The full recipe for this bread is below, but here’s an overview of it.

Sourdough Focaccia: Day One

• Pour the sourdough starter into a large bowl. Add the water, and whisk until the starter is fully dissolved in the water.
• Add the flour and the salt to the bowl, and use a spoon to lightly mix everything together until a shaggy dough forms.
• After 30 minutes, grab a corner of the dough, stretch it up and away from the bowl, and fold it over to the other side. Turn the bowl 90 degrees, and repeat the stretch-and-fold about 15-20 more times.
• Loosely cover the bowl with a towel and rest the dough at room temperature for about 8 hours, or until doubled in size.
• After the dough has doubled in size, cover the bowl with plastic wrap and rest it in the fridge overnight, at least 8 hours.

Sourdough Focaccia: Day Two

• The next day, drizzle an 9×13 baking pan with olive oil, and spread the oil to evenly coat the bottom and sides of the pan. Transfer the dough, upside down, into the baking pan.
• Using both hands, gently pick up the bottom of the dough, pull it away from the pan, and fold it halfway on top of the dough. Repeat with the rest of the dough, so you have a nicely packed rectangle.
• Roll the dough over on top of itself, liking rolling a towel, so that the bottom is now the top.
• Rest at room temperature for 4-6 hours, so that the dough naturally spreads to fit the pan.
• Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 450 F.
• Dimple the top of the dough all over with your fingers, poking through to the bottom of the pan, until the surface is covered in holes and there’s lots of air bubbles.
• Bake the sourdough focaccia for 25-30 minutes, until the top is golden brown.

SOURDOUGH FOCACCIA KEY INGREDIENTS

Sourdough Focaccia

• Sourdough Starter: This is the natural leaven that we use for this recipe. Think of sourdough starter as nature’s active yeast! My sourdough starter has 100% hydration (which means I feed it with equal parts water and flour). Depending on the hydration of your starter, you may need more or less water for this recipe. That may require a bit of testing and learning on your own, but the below recipe will work great for 100% hydration sourdough starters.
• Water: Will serve as the hydration for this sourdough bread recipe.
• Bread flour: Is my preferred flour for both sourdough bread and focaccia. It has a great texture and chew, giving you more “bakery style” bread. You can certainly use all purpose flour, though, and it’s what I use when I don’t have bread flour on hand. The end result will still taste great!
• Salt: For flavor.
• Olive Oil: For drizzling.
• Rosemary: For sprinkling.
• Finishing salt: For sprinkling.

Garlic Butter Topping

• Butter
• Parsley
• Garlic cloves

HOW LONG DOES THIS RECIPE TAKE TO MAKE?

The full recipe is below, but here’s the gist of it:

• Prep time: 10 mins
• Bake time: 25-30 minutes
• Resting time: 21 hours

Yes, that’s right… actually preparing the dough and baking it takes very little time in the grand scheme of things. However, when working with sourdough bread, the bread needs time to rest. Lots and lots of time to rest. That’s because we’re using a natural yeast (sourdough starter).

The upside to this recipe, though, is that you only need to perform one set of stretch and folds. If you’re familiar with making sourdough bread, you may know that you generally need to stretch and fold the dough every 30 minutes for a couple of hours in order to create a strong gluten structure.

This focaccia sourdough recipe, though, only needs one stretch and fold at the beginning. So there’s that!

HOW TO STORE THIS BREAD?

Store the fully cooled sourdough focaccia bread in an airtight container at room temperature. It will stay fresh for about 2-3 days (though, I’ll admit that it’s never lasted that long in my house)!

You may be tempted to store leftovers in the fridge, but don’t do that. The fridge air will dry out the focaccia, leaving you with very sad, hard bread.

I recommend reheating slices of bread in the toaster, or in the oven at 375 F for about 5-10 minutes. Yum! Toasted sourdough bread always tastes great the next day.

SOURDOUGH FOCACCIA FAQ

1. Why does this recipe take so long to make?

That is the beauty of working with sourdough, my friend. It’s the nature of the beast. Sourdough bread needs a long time to rest because we’re working with the natural yeast and bacteria that’s found in wheat, which takes a much longer time to ferment than instant yeast. Nature does not like to be rushed.

In a perfect world, sourdough bread wouldn’t take so long to make. And, yes, while a two day bread recipe seems like a long time, just remember that 95% of that time is spent just resting the dough, so there’s very little hands on activity involved.

Here’s the schedule I used when making the sourdough focaccia at home, so you can get a sense of when you might want to start making your bread:

• Day one: 7:30 AM; mix ingredients
• Day one: 8 AM; fold dough; rest 8 hours
• Day one: 4 PM; transfer dough to fridge; rest 14 hours
• Day two: 8 AM; remove from fridge; rest 4 hours
• Day two: 12 PM; bake

2. How do you do the stretch and folds?

The best way to learn how to do the stretch and folds needed for this recipe is to watch a video of it, which you can find below!

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