It is probably like pounds vs kilograms… whatever you are used to will be easiest for you.
I like the way I describe percentages for three main reasons (other than my personal view of the aesthetics of having different percentages depending on starter vs. instant yeast):
It shows you very clearly the hydration percentage.
No guesswork on the hydration level of the starter. I assume your recipe uses 100% hydration starter, but your ratios do not confirm this unless you read the description of how you calculate the formulas. Most recipes will not include the textual description of how to amounts/percentages were determined.
The percentages for salt and other ingredients never change and are easy to calculate (i.e., salt divided by flour rather than salt divided by (flour + half of starter)). For example, I use 2% salt as a standard ratio and can evaluate all recipes against this. I think having a single universal percentage for all items has great value for non-experts like me.
Hi, anytime my starter isn’t so great smelling, I feed a tiny amount of it with rye flour and get it really excited, and then I feed it with King Arthur bread flour, which has malt added, and it not only holds longer, it develops a great smell.
Thanks, Maplesugar! All I’ve ever fed my starter is whole spelt flour. It would be interesting to try some other flours. I’m pretty sure that the problem I just had was that I’d been neglecting my starter grievously, not feeding it often enough and not feeding it enough when I did feed it. Lesson learned. I have in the past kept a small quantity of starter, about 1/4 cup or so. I’m now keeping even less, maybe a Tablespoon, and doing 2-3 feedings the day before baking and using all but a Tablespoon of the starter in the bake. I’ll see how that goes.
Melissa, I’ve been making the BBA pain a l’ancienne yeasted version for years. I haven’t done it using sourdough yet but plan to soon. I, too, have been experimenting with whole grain. I used Sonora as well, experimenting with 20%, then 50%, then 30%, and I concur with you that 20% seemed to work the best.
I love the pain a l’ancienne approach because, compared to many breads I make, it is mostly hands off. You mix with cold water and bulk ferment in the fridge overnight; take it out of the fridge and leave to ferment/come to room temp over 3 hours; then spill it into an oiled, parchment lined sheet pan (or scrap the parchment as someone here has suggested), dimple with an herb oil of your choice (Reinhart calls for more than I like to use), and proof for another 3 hours (I use a heat pad because the Brod & Taylor proofer doesn’t fit a large sheet pan).
I’m not sure how well the same process would work for sourdough, since the cold water and overnight retard wouldn’t develop as quickly, but I’m going to give it a try soon.
Agree about the oil quantity in BBA - I tried it and decided it was a lot too.
Sourdough leavened dough feels a little different in my experience, but knowing how a yeast recipe behaves gives you a leg up in figuring out the sourdough version. (When I made a hokkaido milk bread in sourdough version for the first time, I kept patient because I knew how big the dough grew in the yeast version…yeast domed more, but both grew)
Maybe you can mix with warm water earlier in the evening, and still retard overnight. Or mix cold later at night and don’t retard.
All sorts of possibilities. I’d love to hear how it goes.
Neat that you also liked the 20% whole grain ratio
Those are good suggestions. Another interesting possibility for converting the BBA recipe to SD if trying to stay true to the theory behind pain a l’ancienne (i.e., residual sugar for superior browning) is a longer cold bulk ferment, 24 or more hours. That could also boost the flavor and alter the crumb.
In practice I’ve found that the yeasted version of BBA pain a l’ancienne focaccia doesn’t brown more than a normal focaccia, so for SD purposes it might not help at all.
For the yeasted version the utility in my using cold water and a cold bulk ferment is flavor/texture development and timing/convenience. I’ll try one or more of these methods for a SD version and report back.
Apologies, but for the benefit of us beginners, can you explain the logic for using your method? I am sure I am being dense (and a beginner), but I don’t see the advantage.
This is fantastic. Made the sourdough version. Was out of honey so used maple syrup instead… the texture and taste was superb. I did everything by hand as were were at our RV…yes I keep a sourdough starter there. Considering our sketchy oven with no real temperature control I just cranked it up all the way and hoped for the best. Will repeat as much as possible this summer.
I made this focaccia recipe trying a third variation: extra sourdough and extra yeast.
My goal was speed, the yeast flavor my birthday-friend had asked for, and the depth of flavor I felt sourdough would bring to the speedy focaccia. I used spelt flour for the whole wheat component. Here are a few pics.
Noting that this recipe was posted 3 years ago, so it may not be top-of-mind anymore, but as I was looking for a focaccia recipe I looked here, beyond my usual The Perfect Loaf recipe. I love the taste and color of Kamut so this recipe especially appeals
I’m wondering if there’s a particular reason the dough weight here is so much lower than Maurizio’s? His 9x13 focaccia scales out at 1200g to your 1000g. Just personal preference? Or something in how it bakes up?
I think I was aiming more for a Ligurian style focaccia, which is less tall/thick. You can scale up if you like a thicker focaccia. Any amount of whole grain flour and/or low gluten flour will increase density, so I suppose there is some benefit to keeping the focaccia thin because heat will blast through the dough faster when it’s baking and there is less weight on the internal bubbles.
I did, in fact, make a focaccia today, using your recipe with a few mods. As I’d suggested, I increased the dough weight to 1200g. Paying heed to your supposition about the weight maybe keeping the airy-ness too much in check, I swapped out the bread flour (I use KA) for Breadtopia’s 00 strong white flour, with 0.5% higher gluten content than the bread flour. The whole grain was Kamut.
The dough was a dream to work with - strong but with enough extensibility to get it stretched out to the full pan size without any trouble, and the rise was pretty quick - I cut off the bulk after 3:45 (including 4 coil folds) and the final proof at 45 minutes.
I topped it with various colors of cherry/grape tomatoes, rosemary, and Maldon salt.
The bake time, atop a pizza stone, was about on par with the original recipe - 30 minutes (with internal temp of about 206F).
I haven’t sliced it yet, so no crumb pictures, but here are a few shots before and after baking
Needed a recipe for focaccia, and this one came in handy. Used active dry yeast. It worked great. I replaced the Kamut with Turkey Red. It was delicious.
