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Sourdough focaccia bread topped with rosemary, roasted garlic, and cherry tomatoes

How to Make Sourdough Focaccia Bread

Posted on March 10, 2025March 10, 2025 by craig

My family is pretty big into movies. My husband and I watch movies at home every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and then every Tuesday (which is “cheap Tuesday” at the theatres here) we check out a new release with my mom. While we sometimes skip a day here and there, it works out to about 200 movies a year.

So when the Oscars comes around, it’s a big event for us. We all invite ourselves over to my sister’s place (because she’s the only one with cable to watch the telecast), and my husband makes a big dinner for Caesar salad, fettuccini Alfredo, and apple crumble, all made from scratch (even the Alfredo sauce and Caesar dressing).

Normally we buy a loaf of garlic bread from the grocery store to go with it—but I’ve been in a real baking mood lately and offered to make sourdough focaccia bread.

Sourdough focaccia bread is easy to make if you have a healthy sourdough starter bubbling away, and the toppings are completely optional and customizable to your tastes and what you have on hand.

I ended up topping mine with herb salt (also known as butcher salt), roasted garlic, dehydrated rosemary, and (dehydrated and then rehydrated) cherry tomatoes.

It was soft and airy like you expect of focaccia, with the chewiness and tang of sourdough, and immensely tasty with the toppings I added. It immediately became a crowd pleaser.

How to make sourdough focaccia bread

The first thing you’ll need before even starting this recipe is a healthy, active sourdough starter.

If you’re brand new to sourdough and don’t have a starter, I have a post here to help guide you through the steps of creating one. It takes about a week to get one going and your success will vary based on local climate conditions and a number of other factors. Your sourdough starter will likely get stronger as time goes on, provided you take good care of it, so your results with this recipe may be partly influenced by how old your starter is.

Step one: Make the dough

Start by adding 50-100 grams of sourdough starter to a bowl. I went with the full 100 grams because my starter can be a little slow to rise sometimes, especially in the winter (and I was making this in early March), so I figured extra starter would be better.

To the starter, add 10 grams of salt and 440 grams of water.

Stir to combine as best you can. A spatula will work well, but I sometimes opt for a fork.

Water, salt, and sourdough starter mixed together

Then add 512 grams of flour. As I outline in my post about sourdough starters, I’ve started doing a mix of whole wheat flour and white flour, as it works better in my local climate, so feel free to experiment with flour if you’re curious. If you’re not in Canada, you’ll likely want to use bread flour as it will likely give you better results. All-purpose flour in Canada is similar to bread flour, so I just use the standard all-purpose.

Mix in the flour with your spatula or fork until you get a rough and wet dough ball.

Step 2: Rest and fold (and rest again)

Cover with plastic wrap or a damp towel and let the dough ball rest for about a half hour.

Then do a “pinch and fold”. Grab a pinch of dough from the edge of the ball, pull it upward and toward the centre of the ball, folding it over. Go around the dough ball, doing this about 8-10 times. Try not to tear the dough as that’s not the goal.

Gently rub a splash of olive oil over the top of the dough. I have to confess that I used canola oil because it’s what I had on hand (and olive oil has become very expensive lately).

Cover again with plastic wrap or a damp towel and let rest for 4 to 18 hours. Since it’s winter here, things are cool and dry, I went with the full 18 hours. What you’re ultimately looking for is for the dough to have doubled in size, so how long this takes will vary based on where you are and where you leave the dough. it might be tempting to put the dough in a warmer place like in an oven with the oven light on, but this might become too warm. Your best strategy is to do this at room temperature and just let it take how long it’s going to take. As a chef once told me, the key to making anything with sourdough really good is a “long, slow rise”.

Step three: Transfer dough to baking dish

Drizzle a few tablespoons of olive oil in a 9×13 baking dish. To make sure nothing would stick, I also gave the sides of the dish a spritz with some cooking spray.

Gently scoop the dough out of the bowl and into the dish. It will likely form an oval shape. Gently grab each side and fold toward the centre so you roughly have a rectangle. Flip the dough over to the seam side is down.

Sourdough focaccia dough resting in a baking dish

Rub the top of the dough with more oil, then cover again and let it rest for 4-6 hours.

Step four (optional): Prepare toppings

Focaccia can be made with just a generous sprinkle of salt over the top, but I wanted to make mine a little extra special, so I roasted a head of garlic in the air fryer until the cloves were soft and cooked, and I threw some dehydrated cherry tomatoes into water to plump them up a little bit.

Step five: Bake the sourdough focaccia bread

Heat oven to 425 F.

Rub some oil onto your hands and then press down on the dough to create dimples. Do this across the whole surface.

Sourdough focaccia with dimples pressed into it

Add toppings of your choice. At a minimum, you should add a generous sprinkle of sea salt / chunky / flaky salt. I used:

The garlic I roasted in the air fryer
Drained rehydrated cherry tomatoes

Dried rosemary
Butcher’s salt (a flaky/chunky salt with dried herbs mixed in)

Sourdough focaccia ready for the oven, with roasted garlic, cherry tomatoes, rosemary, and salt on top

Bake for 25 minutes until golden brown.

When ready, remove dish from oven and let cool for at least 20 minutes before slicing. If you cut into it while it’s hot, moisture could evaporate, so it’s best to let it cool even longer.

You should have an absolutely delicious sourdough focaccia bread that will impress anyone.

Sourdough Focaccia Bread

Light and fluffy focaccia with the tang of sourdough, this easy to make recipe is a crowd-pleaser.

5 from 2 votes

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Prep Time 20

Cook Time 25

Resting Time 1

Course Appetizer

Cuisine bread, Italian

Ingredients

50-100 g Bubbly and Active Sourdough Starter
10 g Salt

440 g Water
512 g Flour (see note)
3 Tbsp Olive Oil

Flaky salt and/or other toppings of your choice (cherry tomatoes, roasted garlic, rosemary, etc.)

Instructions

Add sourdough starter, water, and salt to a bowl. Mix with a spatula or fork until well blended.
Add flour and mix until a dough forms.

Cover with plastic wrap or a damp towel and let rest 30 minutes.
Do a "pinch and fold"—pinch the outer edge of the dough ball and fold it to the centre. Do this 8-10 times around the dough ball.
Gently rub the top of the dough ball with a splash of oil.

Cover and let rest 4-18 hours, until doubled in size.
Once doubled in size, drizzle about 2 Tbsp oil into a 9×13 baking dish. Optionally, you can spray or grease the sides of the dish to help prevent sticking.
Scoop dough into baking dish. It should form an oval. Fold the dough so it roughly looks like a rectangle and flip the dough so the seam side is down.

Cover and let rest 4-6 hours. During this time you could prep any optional toppings that need prepping, such as roasting garlic.
Heat oven to 425℉.
Rub oil on your hands and press down on the dough, creating dimples across the top. Sprinkle with flaky salt and add any toppings you wish.

Bake for 25 minutes until golden brown.
Let rest at least 20 minutes before slicing. If it's hot while slicing, moisture may evaporate, leaving a dryer, denser bread.

Notes

Note on flour:

If you’re in Canada, all-purpose flour should be fine. I opt to use a blend of about 20% whole wheat flour and 80% all-purpose flour.

If you’re outside of Canada, you will have better results using bread flour.

(Canada’s all-purpose flour is similar to bread flour in the rest of the world.)

Keyword focaccia bread, sourdough focaccia

How to Make Jalapeño Cheddar Sourdough Bread (or with Other Hot Peppers)

Posted on March 27, 2023February 28, 2025 by craig

A few months ago I got myself going with a sourdough starter. A sourdough starter is basically fermented flour, and once you create this starter, you have to constantly feed it to keep it alive. And since so much work goes into keeping it alive, I’m always looking to try new recipes that use the sourdough starter. A lot of those recipes will end up on here, including sourdough bread, English muffin bread, and sourdough chocolate chip cookies.

(If you don’t have a sourdough starter yet, check out this post about starting and maintaining one.)

My sourdough starter—bubbly, active, and ready to use

In addition to having this sourdough starter to utilize, I also have several jars of pickled hot peppers from last year’s garden that need to be eaten before the fall harvest and a fresh batch of peppers—so that got me thinking about a cheddar and hot pepper sourdough bread!

What I’ve done here is a bit of a mishmash of two recipes—my existing sourdough recipe and a cheddar jalapeño sourdough recipe I found online. I didn’t really like the steps of the new recipe, so I adapted my existing recipe to make a tasty hybrid.

Sourdough is remarkably simple in terms of ingredients. It’s literally sourdough starter (which is flour and water), more water, more flour, and salt.

With the sourdough recipe I use, I start the dough the night before and then let it rest and rise overnight at room temperature. You can leave it on the counter, but I have a cat that loves anything made with flour, so I have to stick it in the microwave or oven so it stays safe from him.

Sorry for the poor lighting, I took this photo at 11:30 at night.

Theoretically, when the dough rests overnight, it should double in size. However, this is highly dependent on ideal local climate conditions and Winnipeg in the middle of winter is not an ideal climate. I’ve been told that Winnipeg in the summer isn’t ideal either. While I get some rise in my dough, it’s nowhere near double. So don’t panic if you don’t get the kind of rise you see on other blogs.

After resting overnight, it’s time to work in the peppers and cheese.

While this recipe is for jalapeño and cheddar sourdough, what I have on hand are pickled banana peppers. I like the taste of banana peppers better, but they’re also a lower on the Scoville scale, meaning they’re not as hot as jalapeño peppers—so if you like the sound of this recipe but you’re not sure if you can handle jalapeños, banana peppers might be the way to go.

(You can usually find pickled banana peppers in the condiments aisle of your grocery store, next to things like ketchup and mustard. If the jars are labelled with “mild” or “hot”, you’ll want to go with the hot ones. The mild ones can have the same heat level as bell peppers, which would be kind of pointless for this recipe.)

With the “pinch and fold” method, we start working the cheese and peppers into the dough. (Full directions on how to do this are in the recipe below.)

The original jalapeño cheddar sourdough recipe I looked up had the cheese and peppers mixed in with the dough at the very beginning. The end result would give cheese and peppers spotted throughout the loaf, whereas my method here results in a ribbon of cheese and peppers that runs through the whole loaf.

While I like the idea of cheese and peppers being spread throughout like little morsels of goodness, I didn’t like the idea of leaving the cheese (a dairy product) at room temperature overnight while the dough was resting. To be fair, that recipe had the dough in the fridge overnight, but if I’m having enough difficulty getting a rise out of my dough at room temperature, I’d have much poorer results in the fridge.

After resting for a bit we do another round of “pinch and folds” to work the cheese and peppers in a bit more. However, be a bit gentler at this stage. I found I’d ripped the dough in one spot and cheese started tumbling out; I hadn’t realized the cheese had migrated so close to the surface of the dough ball.

Now we let it rest one final time in a bowl lined with a towel and sprinkled with flour.

Toward the end of the 30-60 minute rest, we crank the oven up to 450 F.

Transfer the dough to some parchment paper—pinch seam side down—and cut some slits in it, then transfer the whole thing to a dutch oven.

Lower the heat to 425 F, then put the dutch oven (with the lid on) on the centre rack. Bake for 20 minutes, then remove the lid and bake for an additional 40 minutes. If it looks like it needs a little longer, you could give it an additional ten minutes. (When I pulled it out and later sliced into it, it looked like it could have used just a little bit longer. The addition of the cheese likely altered the baking time just a little bit.)

Fresh from the oven and smelling so good!

Transfer to a wire rack and let it cool for at least an hour before slicing into it.

This was my first time making a cheddar and hot pepper bread and I would absolutely make it again!

Sourdough is usually chewy, but this was chewy and extra soft. The tang of the hot peppers had worked its way into the rest of the bread, so even when I wasn’t biting into a pepper, I could taste them. The cheddar cooked perfectly—not so cooked that it’s crunchy, but cooked enough that it’s solid.

This tastes wonderful at room temperature with some butter, but would likely taste amazing toasted, buttered, and served alongside a spicy pasta dish.

Jalapeño Cheddar Sourdough Bread

Chewy sourdough bread with the zing of hot peppers and sharp cheddar makes for an irresistible snack.

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Prep Time 14

Cook Time 1

Course Bread

Cuisine bread

Equipment

1 Dutch Oven

Ingredients

50 g Bubbly, active sourdough starter

330 g water (1⅓ cup + 1 Tbsp)
9 g salt (1½ tsp)
125 g Whole wheat flour (can round to 1 cup)

375 g All-purpose flour (can round to 3¼ cups)
¼ cup Jalapeño peppers, pickled or fresh, chopped (other hot peppers can be substituted; pickled banana peppers taste amazing here)
½ cup Cheddar cheese, shredded (go for an old/sharp cheddar)

Instructions

This recipe starts the night before and concludes the next day.
The night before, whisk starter and water together in a large bowl.
Mix in flour and salt with a fork until the dough becomes stiff and shaggy. Finish mixing with your hands.

Cover with a damp towel or plastic wrap and rest at room temperature for 30 minutes.
After resting, work the dough into a ball using the "pinch and fold" method. Grab a pinch of dough at the edge and fold it / press it into the middle of the ball. Rotate the bowl a bit and do it again, repeating until you've gone all the way around. The dough will feel tighter as you do this.
Cover with a damp towel or plastic wrap and let it rise overnight at room temperature, about 10-12 hours.

After 10-12 hours, the dough should double in size. Don't panic if it doesn't; while mine does get larger, it certainly doesn't double in size. A lot of this comes down to local climate factors and my local climate is not amenable to sourdough.
Sprinkle flour on your work surface, like a counter or table. Scoop the dough out of the bowl and onto the work surface. Spread the peppers and cheddar on top of the dough.
Use the pinch and fold method to start shaping the dough into a ball. Once you've gone around the whole ball, flip it over so the pinched seam is down. Cover with a towel and let rest for 30 minutes.

Flip it over again so the seam is up. Pinch and fold the dough one more time. If you pinch and fold too hard, you might rip the dough and cheese and peppers might tumble out, so be gentle.
Line a bowl with a dry towel and sprinkle the towel with flour. Let the dough ball rest in the towel, seam side up and with the towel edges covering it, for thirty minutes to an hour. The dough should rise some more, but again local climate may give you different results.
Preheat oven to 450℉.

Cut a sheet of parchment paper larger than your dough. Place the parchment over the dough and flip the bowl so the dough is now resting on the parchment in your hand. Set it down on the counter and with a sharp knife, make four shallow cuts at north, east, south, and west points (or 3, 6, 9, and 12 on the clock).
Grabbing the edges of the parchment paper, lift the dough and place it into the dutch oven and put the lid on.
Reduce oven heat to 425℉ and put the dutch oven in on the centre rack.

Bake for 20 minutes. Remove the lid. Bake for an additional 40 minutes. If the bread doesn't seem ready, bake for ten more minutes.
Transfer to a wire rack and let cool for at least an hour before slicing.

Keyword Bread, Sourdough