Ingredients:
500 g flour - (375 g Ground Up Pizza flour / 125 g Coastal Queen Ancient Grain AP flour)
400 g water, room temperature
60 g active sourdough starter
30 g oil
20 g sugar
15 g sea salt
Instructions:
Mix flour, water, and starter in a large bowl until all ingredients are fully incorporated. Cover the bowl in plastic wrap and set a timer for 30 minutes.
After 30 minutes, remove the plastic wrap and add the oil and sugar to the dough. It will take a bit of handwork to integrate the oil, you can try squeezing the oil into the dough, then flip the dough over and keep squeezing/flipping until the oil has been incorporated. Cover the bowl again with plastic wrap and set a timer for 30 minutes.
After 30 minutes, remove the plastic wrap and add the salt to the dough using the same squeezing/flipping motions. Once you can no longer feel the salt grains in the dough, cover the bowl back up with plastic wrap and let it sit at room temperature on your counter, or a warm spot in the house, for 3–5 hours. When the dough looks like it has almost doubled in size, transfer it to the refrigerator overnight.
In the morning, pull the dough out of the refrigerator. Sprinkle your counter with a bit of olive oil and drop the dough (it will weigh ~950 grams) onto it. Give it a few folds to gather it into a tidy shape, then use a bench scraper to cut your dough roughly in half. Weigh each portion on a digital scale and add or subtract bits of dough as necessary to create same-sized dough balls.
Drop each ball into a well-oiled ¼ sheet pan. Allow the dough to rise for a few hours, then press your fingers into the dough to dimple it and stretch it to the edges of the pan. You may need to repeat this process a few times to get the dough fully stretched to the edges of the pans. I often proof my pans of dough in the oven with (only) the light on and the door cracked open (the oven light creates enough heat on its own to safely expedite a rise).
When you are ready to bake, remove the dough pans and preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Sprinkle on your toppings of choice and gently press them into the dough, de-gassing and dimpling with your fingertips.
Place the dough pans in the hot oven and bake for approximately 30 minutes. If you have a baking steel or pizza stone, you can put the pans on it to bake; it's a great way to get some crisp texture on the bottom crust. Once the focaccia is baked, I turn the oven off, remove the focaccia from the pan, and then return it directly onto my baking steel for about 5 minutes to crisp the bottom crust even more.
Let the finished focaccia cool completely on wire racks.
Recipe designed for Ground Up by Dre Rawlings.
