Focaccia Barese
#cooking
A simple sourdough focaccia recipe.
Ingredients:
- 100g sourdough
- 300g lukewarm water
- 350g soft wheat flour "Tipo 1" (stone-ground semi-whole grain; 12% in protein)
- ~6g salt
- olive oil
Feed your sourdough starter, and wait until it is at peak activity (more than doubled its volume).
In a bowl, pour the water. Dissolve the sourdough in the water by stirring well together.
Add the flour to the mixture (sifting it, if possible), and work the dough. When the dough becomes very sticky, add the salt. Keep working the dough until it becomes a single non-sticky ball. Add small amounts of flour if needed to make the dough less sticky.
Coat another bowl in a thin layer of olive oil (use your hands to use as little oil as possible). Pour the dough in the new bowl, cover, and wait 40 minutes.
After 40 minutes, take one side of the dough ball from below, gently stretch it by pulling up, and fold it over to the centre. Repeat this for the whole circumference of the dough. Cover, and wait 40 more minutes.
Repeat the step above until you've made 4 rounds of folds. After folding 4 times, let the dough rest for 3 hours. The dough should more or less double in volume during this time.
Coat a baking tray in olive oil (again, use your hands), then the dough over the tray. Coat your fingertips in olive oil (you can use the oil on the bottom of the pan) and use your fingertips to very gently shape the dough in a low, square-ish shape.
Let the dough rest for 2.5-3 hours (until the dough roughly doubles and big bubbles form) in the oven with only the light on, or covered (but without touching the surface of the dough).
Take the baking tray out of the oven, and pre-heat it to ~225°C, or max temperature if lower (don't go above this, or the oil will burn).
Pour a tiny bit of olive oil on the focaccia, and very gently spread it all over the surface with your fingers. Put whatever you want on top of the dough - traditionally, that's sea salt and rosemary.
When the oven is warm, bake for 10 minutes on the bottom of the oven (touching the oven's surface), and then 5 minutes on the first level (just above the oven's bottom). If your oven's temperature isn't particularly high, keep baking on the first level until you like the cooking point.
Source: YT Video, with minor modifications.