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DOUGHRISEFOUNDERS
Recipe
5 min read
Sourdough Focaccia with Roasted Grapes, Gorgonzola & Walnuts
A spring-ready sourdough focaccia topped with roasted grapes, gorgonzola and walnuts. Deeply flavoured, surprisingly simple, and absolutely worth your weekend.
pizza on brown plastic trayThere is something quietly brilliant about pulling a tray of focaccia out of the oven in April, when the kitchen is still cool enough in the evenings that the warmth actually feels good. The dough comes out golden and blistered, the grapes have collapsed into little jammy pockets, and the gorgonzola has gone all melty and sharp around the edges. It smells like something a good Italian bakery would charge you a fiver a slice for.
This sourdough focaccia recipe is one I keep coming back to when I want something that feels a bit special without requiring a full weekend of planning. The dough is a high-hydration pan focaccia, long-fermented for flavour, and the topping combination of roasted grapes, gorgonzola and walnuts hits that sweet-salty-rich note that is genuinely hard to stop eating. It works beautifully as a sharing bread at the table, or honestly just torn into chunks straight from the tin with a cold beer. The 75% hydration dough is wetter than a typical bread dough, which is what gives focaccia that open, pillowy crumb and those satisfying olive-oil-crisped edges.
Dough
- 450g strong white bread flour
- 340g (340ml) lukewarm water
- 90g active sourdough starter (100% hydration)
- 9g (1.5 tsp) fine sea salt
- 30g (2 tbsp) extra virgin olive oil, plus extra for the tin
Topping
- 200g seedless red grapes
- 120g gorgonzola dolce, torn into rough pieces
- 50g walnut halves, lightly broken
- 2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
- 1 tsp fresh thyme leaves
- Flaky sea salt, to finish
- A few grinds of black pepper
Baker's Tips
- Your starter needs to be properly active for this one. Feed it 4–6 hours before you mix, and use it when it is domed and just starting to fall. A sluggish starter in April (kitchens can still be cool) means a sluggish dough, so give it a warm spot to wake up.
- Do not skip the cold retard overnight. Parking the dough in the fridge after bulk fermentation builds a depth of flavour you simply cannot rush. It also makes the morning bake much easier to time around real life.
- If you are baking regularly and scaling batches up or down, DoughRise Pro lets you save unlimited formulas and export them to PDF so your recipes are always where you need them. Genuinely useful when you start tweaking hydration or flour blends across different bakes.
METHOD
- Mix the dough. In a large bowl, combine the flour and water and mix until no dry flour remains. Cover and leave to rest for 30 minutes. This is a loose autolyse that lets the flour hydrate fully before you add anything else.
- Add starter and salt. Add the active sourdough starter and fine sea salt to the rested dough. Squeeze and fold everything together until incorporated, then add the olive oil and work it in the same way. The dough will feel slippery at first but will come together after a minute or two of folding.
- Bulk fermentation with folds. Cover the bowl and leave to ferment at room temperature (ideally around 22–24°C) for 5–7 hours. During the first 2 hours, perform a set of stretch-and-folds every 30 minutes (four sets total). After that, leave it undisturbed. You are looking for the dough to increase by about 50–75% and feel light and airy when you tilt the bowl. Check the bulk fermentation time calculator if your kitchen runs particularly warm or cool this time of year.
- Cold retard. Once bulk is done, transfer the dough to a lightly oiled tin (roughly 30 x 20cm works well) and stretch it gently to fill about two-thirds of the tin. It will not reach the edges yet. Cover with cling film and refrigerate overnight, or for up to 16 hours.
INTO THE TIN
- Bring it back to room temperature. Remove the tin from the fridge and leave at room temperature for 1.5–2 hours. The dough should relax and spread naturally to fill the tin. If it is being stubborn, let it rest a little longer. Rushing this step means the dough fights back when you dimple it.
- Dimple and top. Drizzle a generous amount of olive oil over the surface and use your fingers to press deep dimples all the way across the dough. Scatter the grapes evenly over the top, pressing some gently into the dimples. Add the torn gorgonzola, walnut pieces and thyme. Finish with flaky salt and black pepper.
- Final proof. Leave the topped focaccia to proof for another 30–45 minutes at room temperature while you preheat your oven to 230°C (210°C fan) with a shelf in the lower-middle position.
- Bake. Bake for 22–25 minutes until deeply golden, the grapes are roasted and the cheese is bubbling. The edges should look properly crisp where they have been in contact with the oiled tin. Leave to cool in the tin for 10 minutes before lifting out.
Why this works
High-hydration focaccia doughs rely on the olive oil doing two jobs at once. Inside the dough, it coats the gluten strands and inhibits some gluten development, which is exactly what you want here because a slightly weaker, extensible gluten network produces that characteristic open, tender crumb rather than a chewy one. On the outside, the oil pooling in the tin essentially fries the base as it bakes, giving you that golden, slightly crispy bottom that makes focaccia so satisfying. The overnight cold retard slows fermentation right down, extending the window for organic acids to develop without over-proofing the structure.
Scaling this up for a group, or want to experiment with different flour blends? Use the free DoughRise Baker's Percentages Calculator to adjust quantities accurately without doing the maths by hand.
Happy baking! Find everything you need at doughrise.store
Photo by Iñigo De la Maza on Unsplash