Sourdough focaccia, a mediation
an outtake from LINGER
Welcome to To Vegetables, With Love, a celebration of a vegetable life, less ordinary. ‘ Find archived recipes on my recipe index.
This week, I’m so excited to share an outtake from my upcoming book LINGER which is out in 9 days in Australia (!!) and 7 weeks in USA and the world! I’ll be traveling to Australia next week for events in Sydney and Melbourne, with lots of media appearances too, and then back to NYC to prepare for the US launch with lots of events across the country. I hope to meet lots of you during my travels.
A reminder, this newsletter format will be a bit funky over the next few months, as I travel for the Linger book tour.
NEW THIS WEEK
MY TOMATO DUMPLING SALAD DEBUTS ON NYT COOKING YOUTUBE:
Fresh Corn and Black Bean Salad With Corn Chips
Potato Salad With Pickles
AUSTRALIAN BOOK TOUR:
KINOKUNIYA, SYDNEY
in conversation with Jennifer Wong and Benjamin Law
Tuesday 26 August, 7pm
Book tickets here
READINGS, MELBOURNE
in conversation with Besha Rodell
Thursday 28 August, 6.15pm
Book tickets here
SIGNED + PERSONALIZED US BOOKS HERE: BOOKS ARE MAGIC
15% OFF LINGER, FINAL HOURS OF THIS SALE AT NOW SERVING LA (PURCHASES ARE ALSO ELIGIBLE FOR THE PREORDER BONUS)
US PREORDER BONUS: INFO HERE
Prologue:
This post was planned before everyone started obsessing about sourdough this week because of this. I am not a Swiftie, but I appreciate a timely story. I have a lot of affection for this meditative recipe I wrote for Linger, and it was a part of the story until the very end, when I decided to cut it before submitting the final manuscript. For writers, the reasons why we self-edit are not clear. For me, it’s often just a whim. Yet, I think this piece shows that there is still value in deleted passages.
There are countless naturally leavened focaccia recipes out there, so I don’t need to give you another. They are mostly variations of the same principles – flour, water, salt, leaven and time.
Baking with sourdough in incredibly personal. It is a process that binds itself to the rhythms of the baker’s life. I first learnt to bake sourdough bread from Chad Robertson’s essential guide Tartine Bread, which taught me the basic principles, including how to create my own starter, which is 9 years old at the time of writing (her name is Queenie). In the early days, I studied Chad’s basic country sourdough recipe obsessively. Those pages in the book are stained, with flour embedded into the pages. I baked incessantly, with successes and failures. In sourdough baking, as in life, we need to live – and eat – our failures in order to savor our successes.
Early on, I would often lose track of the hourly ‘folding’ that the Tartine recipe requires. I would go out in the afternoon and then let the sourdough overproof. Or I would need the sourdough for dinner, and bake it before it was truly ready.
Time is the most crucial aspect of baking with natural leaven. I really didn’t understand this until Covid, when, locked inside, time was everything and everywhere, all at once. Time allows further strengthening and leavening to occur and for sourness – aka flavour - to develop. The correct timing is also essential – and once we sync the steps of sourdough baking to the personal cadence of our days, we will be much more successful bakers.
During Covid, I started embarking on baking projects with my friend Jill. In our respective homes, we would bake the same recipe, and send each other photos of our progress throughout the day. This was an important source of community for both of us during a period of inexplicable isolation and loneliness. The projects we chose were mostly bread, predominantly sourdough recipes. It was during this time, I became much freer with my baking, happy to follow instructions but always giving myself the agency to veer from the rules if I desired. That sense of freedom in the kitchen made me a more confident baker. With the fear of failure gone, I started to succeed.
My friend Alexandra Stafford’s Simple Sourdough Focaccia recipe showed me how I could adapt sourdough making to suit me. Her recipe calls for an 8 – 18 hours room temperature rest for the dough, with optional intervention – that’s right, Alexandra gives us the option to perform just 1 fold, 30 minutes after mixing the batter, and only if time permits. This flexible and minimalist approach was a great match for my often errant schedule.
Once I nailed Alexandra’s recipe, I incorporated elements of Caroline Schiff’s sourdough recipe into my own approach. As one of the best pastry chefs in New York City, Caroline is also the master of sourdough, and invented one of the pandemic’s enduring social media food trends, the ‘sourdough discard pancake’. Caroline shares an excellent salted honey focaccia in her book The Sweet Side of Sourdough but the focaccia recipe of hers that I started with was one she shared on Instagram in 2020. Her recipe called for three sets of folds over three hours, followed by an overnight rest in the fridge. A bit more intervention than Alexandra’s but still do-able. I especially loved the ‘overnight’ approach because that means we wake, ready to bake.
Then along came Mary Grace Quigley. Mary Grace started posting about sourdough bread on Instagram in 2020, but I discovered her work a few years later via the Australian lifestyle site ABC Lifestyle (for which I’ve been a monthly contributor for many years). Mary Grace is a self-taught home baker and the approachable, unfussy way she tackles sourdough baking struck a chord with me (and many others). Sourdough has it’s very own vernacular (levain, poolish, autolyze, fold etc) and what I loved about Mary Grace’s approach is that she banished all of that, and explained the process in everyday language that all home cooks could understand. Mary Grace took the ‘hands-off’ element of sourdough making to another level, instructing us to mix the dough at 7.30pm, perform a few folds every hour until we go to bed, before leaving it out on the counter until morning. Mary Grace’s scheduling really worked with the tempo of my day, reinforcing that many of the sourdough baking challenges experienced by home bakers are actually related to timing.
Since the lockdown, I have mainly baked sourdough focaccia, using a combination of methods and knowledge garnered from Tartine, Alexandra, Caroline and Mary Grace. I have shared the recipe and timings I use here, but I encourage you to use this as a blueprint for your own perfect sourdough focaccia schedule.
For instructions and lots of knowledge on how to create your own starter, follow Alexandra Stafford’s guide here, and for an excellent gluten free baking resource including how to make your own gluten-free starter, consult Cannelle et Vanille Bakes Simple: A New Way to Bake Gluten-Free by Aran Goyoaga (note, Aran has a new GF bread book coming out very soon, preorder here)
