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DOUGHRISEFOUNDERS
Recipe
6 min read
Sourdough Focaccia Bianca with Roasted Garlic, Rosemary & Flaky Salt
A pillowy, golden sourdough focaccia bianca topped with roasted garlic, rosemary and flaky salt. Perfect spring baking project with real fermentation flavour.
Pull a focaccia out of a hot oven on a Sunday afternoon in April and something shifts in the kitchen. The smell hits first, all warm olive oil and roasted garlic, and then you hear that crackle as the bottom crust makes contact with a cooling rack. This is the kind of bake that makes your flat smell incredible and costs you almost nothing in effort, just a bit of patience and decent timing.
Focaccia bianca is one of those recipes I keep coming back to because it's genuinely forgiving, proper sourdough flavour without any of the anxiety of scoring and steaming a batard. The dough is high hydration, around 80% hydration, which sounds alarming if you're used to lower-hydration loaves, but that wetness is exactly what gives you those huge open bubbles and that pillowy interior. Spring is a great time to tackle this because your kitchen is warming up, fermentation moves at a sensible pace, and the whole thing just feels right alongside whatever's going on outdoors. I made a version of this last weekend with some roasted garlic I had leftover from a Thursday dinner, and honestly it barely lasted an hour before it was gone.
Dough
- 450g strong white bread flour
- 360g lukewarm water (80% hydration)
- 90g active sourdough starter (100% hydration)
- 9g (1.5 tsp) fine sea salt
- 30g good quality olive oil, plus extra for the tin and dimpling
Topping
- 1 whole head of garlic
- 4–5 sprigs of fresh rosemary
- 2g (a generous pinch) flaky sea salt
- 30ml olive oil for finishing
Baker's Tips
- Your starter needs to be active and bubbly before you mix this dough. If it peaked a couple of hours ago and is starting to fall back, give it a feed and wait. Using a sluggish starter is the most common reason focaccia comes out flat and dense.
- Cold-proof overnight in the tin for a slower, deeper fermentation. If your kitchen is warm (above 22°C in spring sunshine), pop the dough in the fridge after the first two folds and let it finish proving in the tin the next morning.
- If you're baking this regularly and want to save your formula with different batch sizes and hydration tweaks, DoughRise Pro lets you save unlimited formulas and export them to PDF, which is handy when you've finally dialled in a version you love and don't want to lose it.
- Roast the garlic first so it has time to cool. Slice the top off the whole head to expose the cloves, drizzle with olive oil, wrap loosely in foil, and roast at 180°C (fan) for 35–40 minutes until soft and golden. Set aside to cool completely.
- In a large bowl, mix together the flour, water and active sourdough starter until no dry flour remains. Cover and leave to rest for 45 minutes. This short autolyse period lets the flour hydrate fully and makes the dough easier to handle despite the high water content.
- Add the fine sea salt and olive oil. Work them into the dough by squeezing it through your fingers until fully incorporated, about 2–3 minutes. The dough will feel slippery and a bit ragged at first but will smooth out.
- Over the next 2 hours, perform 4 sets of coil folds, roughly every 30 minutes. To coil fold, wet your hands, lift the centre of the dough upward letting both ends fold underneath, rotate the bowl 90 degrees and repeat. Each set is 4 folds. By the end of the fourth set, the dough should feel noticeably more structured and hold its shape briefly before relaxing.
Why this works
High hydration doughs like this one need gentle, repeated folding rather than aggressive kneading. Coil folds build gluten strength progressively without degassing the bubbles that are already forming. You're essentially organising the gluten network piece by piece, which is why the dough transforms so noticeably between fold one and fold four.
INTO THE TIN
- Generously oil a 30cm x 20cm roasting tin (a standard baking tin works perfectly). Pour the dough in and gently stretch it to fill the tin as best you can without forcing it. If it springs back and won't reach the corners, leave it to relax for 15 minutes and try again. Cover with a shower cap or cling film and either leave at room temperature for a further 2–3 hours if baking same-day, or refrigerate overnight for a cold proof.
- If cold proofed, remove the tin from the fridge about an hour before baking and let it come back to room temperature. The dough should look noticeably puffier and bubbly across the surface. Preheat your oven to 220°C (fan) with a shelf in the lower-middle position.
- Drizzle a generous amount of olive oil over the surface of the dough. Using all ten fingers, press firmly down into the dough to create deep dimples all over, going almost to the bottom of the tin. Don't be shy here. This is the step people rush, but those dimples are where the olive oil pools and creates that incredible crispy-yet-yielding texture.
- Squeeze the cooled roasted garlic cloves from their skins and dot them across the surface, pressing lightly into the dimples. Scatter the rosemary sprigs on top and finish with a generous pinch of flaky sea salt.
- Bake for 22–25 minutes until the top is deep golden and the edges are pulling away from the tin. Lift a corner to check the base is properly browned underneath. If it needs another couple of minutes, give it that time. A pale base means a soggy focaccia.
- Remove from the tin immediately and cool on a wire rack for at least 15 minutes before cutting. I know it's hard to wait, but letting the steam escape means the interior sets properly and you get cleaner slices. Serve warm or at room temperature. It keeps well wrapped at room temperature for a day, and a quick 5-minute blast in a 180°C oven the next morning brings it almost entirely back to life.
Want to scale this recipe up for a bigger tin or adjust the hydration to suit your flour? Use the free DoughRise Hydration Calculator to dial in the exact ratios for your batch size.
Happy baking! Find everything you need at doughrise.store