If baking sourdough bread seems intimidating, start with this sourdough-potato focaccia. It calls for humble ingredients and basic tools you likely have on hand.

Focaccia requires no complicated shaping and no scoring, so you won’t feel pressured to render the Mona Lisa’s likeness in the crust. It tastes divine—it does combine sourdough with potatoes in one glorious carbfest, after all—and has a wonderfully crunchy bottom and silky interior.

Before baking, sprinkle your sourdough-potato focaccia dough with salt only or top it with little odds and ends you have on hand to add flavor and color to the bread and to avoid wasting fresh produce: those last few whole garlic cloves, the leaves of a couple of sprigs of rosemary, a handful of olives or cherry tomatoes or both, for example.

Sourdough-potato focaccia tools

As for equipment, I use a scale for baking because scales measure ingredients accurately and I never lose track of how many cups of flour I’ve added to the bowl, as often happens when I measure by volume—especially when making a large batch. (This recipe makes a small, manageable amount of dough however—the equivalent of one generous loaf of sourdough bread.) If you don’t own a scale, use the measurements for volume that I’ve included in the recipe down below.

While I do pass cooked potato chunks through a food mill to render very smooth potato mash—and yet called this a “No Special Tools Needed Recipe,” honestly, a masher or fork will do the trick. So don’t feel the need to rush out and buy a bunch of tools to make this. Even with sourdough boules, you can make fabulous loaves with the most basic of equipment.

Use a metal tin or glass baking dish to bake this—no Dutch oven necessary. I proof this in the same pan in which I bake it, hence no need for proofing baskets either.

The sourdough starter: Keep it active

When baking with a sourdough starter, you want to use it at its peak—while the starter still has a dome on top (i.e., it’s still rising) or shortly after it has just begun to fall back down. In my kitchen, that magic moment takes place around six hours after feeding my starter/making my leaven. Confused? Go here for sourdough starter FAQs.

Don’t worry if your starter falls after you open the lid like Eleanor has here

Potato types

I’ve baked this sourdough-potato focaccia with both red or yellow new potatoes. Either type works. Although I peel the potatoes before I cook them, the peels need not go to the compost heap. I fry them up quickly for a tasty, fatty, salty, potato-y snack that I eat straight from the pan while working away on other focaccia prep.

If you use leftover mashed potatoes, add a bit less water to the dough to compensate for the additional liquid in the mashed potatoes. You might need to omit as little as a tablespoon or two of water.

Two cloth bags with potatoes to make sourdough-potato focaccia. The top orange and red bag contains three red potatoes. The bottom white bag contains four yellow potatoes. The bags sit on a dark wood tabletop. — New red and yellow potatoes from the farmers’ market

Whip up some fried potato peels (left) while the potatoes cook (right)

A food mill is nice for processing cooked potatoes, but a potato masher or fork will do the trick

Use potato cooking water, if desired

In addition to saving the potato peels, I also save the potato water to add to the dough by first straining the boiled spuds over a bowl. Do not add this water to the dough until it cools to about 85ºF. While focaccia does have a flat shape compared to a boule of bread, hot water can kill your starter and render a dense slab much flatter than you were going for. If you cook your potatoes a day or two in advance, store the strained potato water and the potatoes in the refrigerator until you make your dough.

When I make sourdough bread, I combine the flour and water the night before I start my dough. Because I use the potato cooking water for this sourdough-potato focaccia, I wait until morning to do this. If you combine the flour and potato water the night before you start the dough, the flour, spurred by the starchy potato water, will likely start to ferment while you sleep, well before you want it to, in which case, you’ll end up with an overly fermented dough-like puddle that won’t rise.

(Go here for more ideas to use cooking water and broths.)

The sourdough-potato focaccia baking schedule

Following the schedule I’ve provided in the recipe, you’ll start this dough on the morning of Day One and bake it on the morning of Day Two. But adjust these mere suggestions to fit your schedule. And remember, the warmer your kitchen, the faster your dough will ferment and proof. So adjust the schedule as necessary—and take notes!

All the sourdough-potato focaccia ingredients in a bowl before mixing

Sourdough-potato focaccia dough covered in olive oil and dimpled. Some of the dimples contain garlic cloves. The dough sits in a glass dish on top of a wooden cutting board. — I love the feel of gently dimpling this soft, airy dough just before baking it!

slab of sourdough–potato focaccia cooling in a rectangular glass baking dish set on a wire rack — Sourdough-potato focaccia cooling in the pan

slab of sourdough potato focaccia topped with garlic cloves and cooking on a silver cooling rack — Ready to slice and devour

I cannot lie: Sourdough-potato focaccia is a cross between sourdough and a donut

Print Recipe

5 from 1 vote