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DOUGHRISEFOUNDERS
Recipe
5 min read
Sourdough Grissini with Rosemary, Sea Salt & Olive Oil
Crisp, golden sourdough grissini flavoured with rosemary and flaky sea salt. A brilliant spring recipe that uses your discard and doubles as a showstopper.
Top view of rustic wheat bread slices on board with olive oil and salt. Perfect for food stock.The smell of rosemary hitting a hot oven on a warm May evening is one of those sensory things that makes the whole flat feel like somewhere you actually want to be. These sourdough grissini do that every single time.
Grissini are the kind of thing you make once and then wonder why you ever bought a packet. Long, crackling, deeply savoury breadsticks that shatter when you snap them and somehow manage to be both elegant and totally snackable. The sourdough version adds a faint tang that the shop-bought ones simply cannot touch, and because the dough is relatively low hydration and quick to shape, they are genuinely beginner-friendly. I first made a batch of these after a long week at work, a Friday night with a playlist running and a jar of active starter that needed using. They were gone before midnight. This is that recipe.
Dough
- 250g strong white bread flour
- 100g active sourdough starter (100% hydration)
- 110g warm water
- 40g extra virgin olive oil, plus extra for the work surface
- 7g (1¼ tsp) fine sea salt
Topping
- 2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil, for brushing
- 2 tsp finely chopped fresh rosemary
- 1–2 tsp flaky sea salt (Maldon works brilliantly here)
Baker's Tips
- Your starter should be at or just past peak when you mix this dough. If it is sluggish (the jars in the back of the fridge in late spring are notorious for this), give it a feed a few hours before you start. Think of it like debugging: if the output is wrong, check the input first.
- Roll each grissino as thin and even as you can manage, roughly the width of a pencil. Uneven thickness means some will catch before others are done. A light touch and a well-oiled surface are your friends here.
- If you are tracking multiple batches or experimenting with different hydration levels and flour combinations, DoughRise Pro lets you save unlimited formulas and export your bake history, which is genuinely useful once you start riffing on a recipe.
METHOD
- In a medium mixing bowl, combine the flour, active starter, warm water, olive oil, and fine sea salt. Mix until a rough dough comes together, then turn it out onto a lightly oiled work surface and knead for 5–7 minutes until smooth and slightly tacky. It will not be sticky in the way a high-hydration sourdough is, but it should feel supple and a little elastic. This is a roughly 60% hydration dough, so it handles more like pasta dough than a wet sourdough loaf.
- Shape the dough into a ball, place it back in the bowl, cover with a damp cloth or cling film, and leave to ferment at room temperature (ideally around 22–24°C) for 3 to 5 hours. You are not looking for dramatic oven spring potential here as you would with a loaf; you just want the dough to relax, develop flavour, and become a little pillowy. On a warm May afternoon it will move quickly, so check it after 3 hours.
- Once the dough has fermented and feels noticeably lighter and a bit airy, turn it out onto a very lightly oiled surface. Do not flour the surface; flour will make the grissini dense and the outside dusty rather than crisp. Flatten it gently into a rough rectangle about 1cm thick. Cover loosely and rest for 15 minutes so the gluten relaxes and the dough stops springing back when you try to roll it.
- Preheat your oven to 200°C fan (220°C conventional). Line two large baking trays with parchment.
- Using a sharp knife or a bench scraper, cut the rested dough into strips roughly 1cm wide. Take each strip and roll it gently between your palms on the oiled surface, stretching it out to around 30–35 centimetres long and as even in diameter as you can get it. Place each one on the lined trays, leaving a centimetre or so between them. They will not spread significantly but they do puff very slightly in the oven.
- Brush the grissini lightly with the extra virgin olive oil. Scatter over the finely chopped rosemary and finish with a generous pinch of flaky sea salt along each one. Press the toppings on gently so they stick through the bake.
- Bake for 16–20 minutes, rotating the trays halfway through, until the grissini are deep golden and feel completely firm when you lift one. They will crisp up further as they cool, so do not be tempted to pull them early. If some of the thinner ones are colouring faster, remove them individually and let the thicker ones go a little longer.
- Transfer to a wire rack and leave to cool for at least 10 minutes before serving. They keep well in an airtight tin for 3 days, though in my experience they rarely make it past the first evening, especially if there is a cold glass of something white nearby and a few mates over for the weekend.
Why this works
That 15-minute rest after flattening is a mini-autolyse for your already-developed dough. The gluten strands that tightened up during shaping have time to relax, which means when you start rolling your grissini they will stretch out long and stay put instead of snapping back like elastic bands. It is a small step but it is the difference between frustrating and fluid.
INTO THE OVEN
Want to scale this recipe up for a party or adapt it to different flour types? Use the free DoughRise Baker's Percentages Calculator to adjust quantities for any batch size while keeping your ratios spot on.
Happy baking! Find everything you need at doughrise.store
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