Focaccia Showdown: Is this the end of instant yeast forever?!

[Music] dear Mike thanks to you and pro home cooks I've learned a master sourdough no I'm hoping you can teach me how to make the focaccia of my childhood from Liguria bakery the oldest bakery in San Francisco Liguria bakery is famed for its singular dedication to piccata they sell nothing else and they're usually lines up the door and it frequently sells out by noon I wonder if other folks in quarantine feel this way but I find comfort foods especially meaningful now and nothing is more special to me than the goriias focaccia with its crisp olive oil intensive crust and it's tender and fluffy crumb I've researched online for years and have tested numerous other recipes for years and nothing has come close and many are downright bad so if you can crack the code on a good focaccia recipe I and many other focaccia fans would really appreciate it thank you Mike well dude challenge accepted so first of all that focaccia was absolutely delicious super moist really flavorful especially that pizza one that was incredible I've actually had to off put it on to neighbors because that's just way too much focaccia for one person but I'm definitely inspired to make a bread that I normally don't make in the kitchen I tend to make sourdough and other breads that you've seen on the sandwich series and focaccia is just something that I haven't explored that much but I have been rescue testing and I'm very excited to share some things with you today and even though LaGuardia bakery is in San Francisco the home of sourdough bread that focaccia actually isn't made with a sourdough starter it's made with regular baker's yeast but you know I'm a sourdough guy and it's hard for me not to take it to that sourdough level so that's what I'm gonna do today but I figured I wouldn't leave out the baker's yeast we're gonna make one focaccia that way and then we're gonna take the same recipe and switch out the baker's yeast and add in a sourdough starter and give it a much longer natural fermentation and see what results we get with a sourdough focaccia and who knows maybe with this experiment today we will crack this code jus to the perfect focaccia recipe at home [Music] so the first thing I have to do is feed my sourdough starter that I'm gonna be using for the sourdough focaccia later on in the day so last night I gave it a feeding but this morning it needs to be replenished and needs more food so first I'm gonna discard some sourdough starter and you know the drill by now it's all about the sourdough pancake [Music] [Music] so to feed my sourdough starter I'm gonna use equal parts flour and water by weight around 50 grams each you can do 75 grams as well and just mix that together until you get a thick pancake batter type consistency and I've been getting so many questions from you guys about sourdough starters so what I did was I created the ultimate sourdough starter guide everything you need to know about making a sourdough starter completely from scratch going day by day with pictures and also how to properly use your sourdough starter and also put it into hibernation if you're not making bread I can guarantee you all of your sourdough starter questions are answered in this PDF and all you have to do is click this link right believe it's right here for your free PDF download so when you're using wild yeast when you've got your sourdough starter culture right here it's all about time that's going to be the major difference between this and baker's yeast so this is going to take around four to six hours to activate until we're ready to make our sourdough focaccia and the truth is I can probably finish an entire loaf of focaccia with baker's yeast in that time so that's what we're gonna try to do right now see if we can make an entire focaccia with baker's yeast in the same time it takes to just activate our sourdough starter so what I'm gonna do today is use the exact same ratio the same recipes for both focaccia is because I want to put these two breads against each other the only difference will be of course the yeast so for the first one I'm gonna be using this stuff this is instant yeast dry active yeast baker's yeast it might be called something different depending on what style you get but it's all the same stuff it's one single strain of yeast that works great for rapid rising and also consistent results you also get a fluffier product more like a sandwich bread which I'm really interested to see how it compares to the sourdough starter which I'll be using of course for the focaccia so I'll just be switching these two things out and seeing what happens and then the rest of the ingredients are really simple I'm going to be using two flours right here one is just an all-purpose flour this is a stone ground flour so it's a little on the whole-wheat side then we have salt and olive oil and I will be throwing on some toppings but I haven't decided on the toppings just yet [Music] so as far as technique goes for both of these for Koch's it's gonna be very similar the biggest thing again comes down to time how long it's gonna take between each step so we are using a very wet dough here as you can see and with a wet dough you can't need this that would be a huge mess so what we're gonna be doing is performing stretching folds just like this a stretch and a fold just like I would use for sourdough bread and it might be very sticky at first but every time you stretch and fold you're gonna develop that gluten structure it's gonna become a little more supple a little easier to work with so I'm gonna be performing about three or four of these for each of the dough's and for this Baker's use dough it's gonna be about 15-minute intervals between because this stuff rises fast whereas with the sourdough it's gonna be about 30 to 45 minutes in between each stretch and fold [Music] the dough's actually looking very nice after just two stretching folds and because I'm not worried about structure that much since I'm not actually forming a loaf it's just going in a pan I'm ready to move on from the folding stretching and we're just gonna let this proof for about an hour or two until it doubles in size so I've got a 9 by 13 cake pan right here use whatever pan you have with you know some type of lip on it the key to good focaccia is a good amount of olive oil we want the bottom and the sides nice and crispy and nonstick of course what I love about this dough is that you don't have to form it into some nice ball you just have to push it to the sides so I'm just going to start kind of pushing it out until it forms I'm gonna leave this for 15 minutes to let the gluten relax come back to it and finish the pushing process while this is resting let's talk topic so you saw the focaccia that Jude sent me from LaGuardia bakery a ton of variety you got mushrooms olives pizza green onions and this is just flatbread you can season it with whatever you want so for mine I want to try two different types just for a variety to switch it up and do experiment of course so I'm thinking about a sun-dried tomato and olive and rosemary rosemary is really classic for focaccia I'm gonna throw those three ingredients on this baker's yeast one and then for the sourdough one I haven't quite figured that out yet but I know I've got some fresh mushrooms in the fridge so I'll be adding those in some form right so you can see that has spread out just a little bit just gonna continue pushing that out yeah see now it's easy to just slip right into the corner all right I'll let that rest another 15 minutes and then we'll add our toppings and our dimples all right back at it so here's what we're gonna do we're gonna give it a nice little dousing of olive oil I've got some sun-dried tomatoes and some olives and then some rosemary sprigs I like putting the toppings on before I do the dimples so I kind of pushed the toppings into the bread but you can do them after as well so a great way to season the top of your bread I've got some water here with a little bit of salt let that dissolve in water it's a little warm and then I'm gonna take that water and use that to make the dimples so my fingers don't stick the water's gonna work as a nonstick factor but also it will brine the bread a little bit and give it that salty moisture that it craves this looks gorgeous right here I just described bread as gorgeous but come on that is beautiful so I'm gonna let this proof for I don't know again it's warm maybe a half hour maybe an hour just until it's gotten a little more volume a little more fluff and I thought I'd be able to finish this entire focaccia before the starter was done fermenting we're done rising but I think we're pretty close you see that yeah you know what I need to make sourdough focaccia now while that first for the next half hour I'm gonna make some sourdough focaccia using the exact same recipe just giving it a lot more time to ferment [Music] oh it deflated on me because I dropped it but I think it's ready to go so two quick alterations in the recipe one the water doesn't need to be warm because we don't need to activate that yeast it's already activated and 2 this is just slightly under 2 cups of water because the starter is a hundred percent hydration so it's going to increase the hydration levels a little bit so we got to decrease the hydration with the amount of water we're putting in so everything is slower now so I'm gonna let that rest for around 1/2 hour the final countdown right here looking pretty good didn't really prove that much but I think it's gonna rise a good bit in the oven this beautiful thing go into the oven for about 20 to 25 minutes we'll see you know I'll start it at 15 and then I'll turn it right sourdough stretch and fold around 1 let's do it [Music] so you can see how nice this dough is it's starting to really get a lot smoother you have a little more time to develop that because the yeast doesn't act so fast so this is my last stretching fold it's really nice and smooth and what I'm gonna do is let this sit in the fridge and proof overnight balk rise overnight to really develop maximum flavor I've transferred the dough to a clear bowl so I can really see how much this thing ferments and Rises into the fridge go in and I'll see it and it doesn't close I'll fix that timer went off let's see what we're doing whoa beautiful ride oh that looks okay just give that turn back in for ten minutes we'll be good all right so this was done at 25 minutes but I gave it about an extra three minutes I like it a little darker beautiful check that thing out crispy smells so good Wow that's what all that olive oil is doing making it extra crispy so this only took me four and a half hours I think maybe five hours the results for that amount of time are pretty incredible and it's really what I love about focaccia it's such an underrated bread to make because you don't worry about forming it as long as you focus on the fermentation and the proofing and then of course flavoring this thing up you're gonna get really good results [Music] so we're off to a really good start so that really high hydration dough that's how you get this open crumb see how fluffy that is crispy crust from all the olive oil I'm just gonna try a plain obviously I would dip it in olive oil but I want to really get the essence plus there's so much on this thing really fluffy but you still get some nice texture from the crispy crust a good flavor coming from the ingredients and you get a lot of that olive oil essence throughout the entire focaccia overall I think this is as good as it's gonna get for a five hour focaccia but I do feel like it lacks a little bit of flavor and I've never tried a sourdough focaccia I've never experimented with the natural fermentation and extending the fermentation over two days but I'm really interested to see the flavor comparison because I feel like just in general you're getting most of the flavor from the ingredients not from the actual yeast not from the fermentation because it is so short and it is just that one strain of yeast so that's what I'm interested in figuring out right now next morning overnight proof on the sourdough focaccia I'll check it out you can see we've got some decent volume some fermentation bubbles I was feeling pretty nice what I'm gonna do is just let this sit at room temperature probably for two or three hours and just let this acclimate back and get a little more volume alright then at room temperature for about two hours looking very nice I'm just gonna give it one fold over I can definitely feel some vol same deal we got to get a nice coating of olive oil on the pan last time it created a really good nonstick plus made the dough super crisp pretty much fun trying the bread which I like [Music] stretch it stretch it out just like the last one when it doesn't want to stretch we'll just leave it so I'm gonna leave it there for maybe I don't know half-hour and come back and stretch it just a little more [Music] alright that's looking pretty good right there so same deal here sourdough bread it's just gonna take much longer to proof and I can't tell you the exact amount it's much easier to tell you with baker's yeast bread because it's more consistent but this bread is really gonna come down to the elements how active your starter is the temperature in your house so what I'm gonna do is just let this bread rest and every now and then just check it and see what's going on and once I feel like it's gained some volume it's a little more fluffy and then I'll put in the dimples and I'll put in the toppings and all of that and actually in the meantime I'm gonna make some toppings for this [Music] alright so it's been proofing for about two hours at room temp and you can see it's filled out the walls and we've got some nice bubbles here so I'm gonna top this got the olive oil on the mushrooms and then I'll let it proof a little longer so this does very interesting it feels a little more wet than the regular focaccia that I made earlier where is the dimple structure almost doesn't hold because it's so wet you can see there's some dimples but it just kind of seeps back into itself but I'm excited to see what actually happens when I bake this thing off could be super fluffy so I'm gonna preheat the oven again to 450 and I'll let this thing proof for I think it needs that much or maybe another hour or two right I ended up only proofing for about a half hour this thing I don't know it just feels ready to go oven pre-heated same deal as last time I'm gonna stick it in for 15 minutes and then turn it so this actually went for 30 minutes compared to the other one which was like a few minutes less I don't know what the reason for that is but always go off color with bread don't go after your recipe because all ovens are different and you don't want to undercook you want that color which is gonna be flavor like come on let me give you a better angle in the light that is beautiful right there ha no very hot looking fantastic so excited try this definitely a little less fluffy than this guy right here this one Rose a little more but I am so interested in the taste I've actually never tried sourdough appacha before look at that beauty ah here we go first time eating sourdough focaccia I got to figure out the timing on this retro pack twenty eight hours twenty eight hours verse four and a half five hours I think that's what this was sourdough regular baker's yeast the crumb doesn't look that much different surprisingly it's a little more even the holes yeah just overall we have a more even crumb structure just feels different how do I explain that feels more hefty feels more substantial this feels a little more like foam back to the taste okay this is really interesting I've never done an experiment like this and really put baker's yeast first sourdough yeast back to back it's not even close to be honest so there's actually a biological mechanism when you eat bread your saliva glands release more saliva to break down the bread and it's why you salivate when you eat certain breads and when I eat this sourdough bread that mechanism is working a full effect whereas when I eat this yeast bread the baker's yeast it's not doing the same thing the best way to explain the difference is this baker's yeast bread right here it's like two deep where's this sourdough bread the longer fermentation all of the natural flavors coming through the wild geese multiple strains of yeast compared to one strain abuse mixed with an extended amount of fermentation time you're actually unlocking another dimension in your bread and it's really unexplainable unless you are here tasting the back-to-back try this okay so these look the same right his first taste of a produced taste that this is like dry this is like artisan [Music] [Music]

Channel: Pro Home Cooks

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Keywords: focaccia recipe, perfect focaccia, easy focaccia, fast focaccia, quick focaccia, sourdough focaccia, the perfect focaccia recipe, best focaccia, sourdough vs instant yeast, bakers yeast, sourdough starter, how to use sourdough starter, other recipes for sourdough starter, extra sourdough starter, how to make sourdough starter, pro home cooks, mike g, mike greenfield, new

Id: Xkz202NeaNI

Length: 21min 57sec (1317 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 11 2020