December 23, 2025

Lesson Plan: Get the Focaccia Here A lesson plan for teaching others how to make sourdough focaccia.

The final event at Rose House this semester was a sourdough focaccia workshop, which I called Get the Focaccia Here (I was far too pleased with the name, can you tell?). It was really quite a hit! Teaching artisanal baking is tricky because there's so much downtime. On the one hand, you need your students to understand the downtime and learn the visual cues that might prompt them to move from step to step. On the other hand, ain't nobody got time for an eight-hour lesson. It took a fair bit of planning to get it all done in a short session for my Rose residents. Here's my lesson plan, which was inspired by the excellent sourdough boule class I took at Sea Wolf a few years ago.

I set these ground rules:

• Most steps must be shown.
• There must be fresh-baked focaccia.
• The event must be about an hour long.

Recipes

We will follow:

• Big and Bubbly Focaccia
• Big and Bubbly Focaccia, Sourdough Edition

The former is King Arthur's Recipe of the Year 2025, and the latter proceeds exactly in lockstep. It's pedagogically useful that these recipes are so similar, and so I ask that you use these recipes even if you'd normally use something else. The recipes are straightforward and well-written, and we'll mostly follow them as written.

Print these off, and use a highlighter to mark the differences between the two recipes. There are only a few, and they're basically all about timing. Here's a representative example: step 11 of the yeast recipe calls for a rest of 1-1.5 hours, while step 11 of the sourdough recipe calls for a rest of 4-6 hours.

This may sound a little much, but I advocate that you actually make both of these recipes for your lesson. Having the sourdough and yeast loaves available side by side will help your students understand the tradeoffs involved.

Here's a consolidated list of ingredients:

• All-purpose flour
  • I had King Arthur at hand, and I think they do a good job, but you'll be fine with what you've got.
• Salt
• Sugar
• Water
• Olive oil
• Your sourdough starter (mine is called Trixie)
• Active dry yeast
  • This is a divergence from the recipe, which calls for instant yeast. I will defend this below.

There's a lot of latitude when it comes to toppings. Here's what I had at hand:

• Fresh rosemary
• Maldon salt
• Kalamata olives
• Sundried tomatoes
• Pesto
• Anchovies
• Caramelized onions
• Whole cloves of garlic, split in half lengthwise if large

As to equipment:

• Scale
• Clingwrap
• Flexible spatula
• Large mixing bowl
  • You'll get away with just one bowl because the two recipes will mostly be made in sequence.
• Two 9-inch square baking pans
  • Here you won't get away with just one because the two recipes will be baked in parallel.
  • I have this from Oxo and I borrowed another.
• Oven that's large enough for two 9-inch baking pans.

Pre-Lesson Prep

1. Decide on a time for your lesson. I played myself by announcing my lesson for 10am, which meant that I had to put in my first folds at 2am. Don't be like me; announce a late afternoon lesson. In the rest of this lesson plan I assume you announced 4pm. A cap of 12 students will make good sense, as you'll see.

2. Your first folds will happen at 8am. So at 8am, you will need a cup of ripe starter. If you know how to achieve that, do what you need to do and skip the rest of my discussion for this step. But if you're like me and your starter lives in the fridge and is fed every two weeks and you don't really know its whims and fancies, we'll need to feel things out a little.

   • Bring your starter out of the fridge at 4pm the previous day and give it a 1:1:1 feed (1 part starter, 1 part flour, 1 part water) by weight.
   • Put it in a warm spot. I was very happy using an oven that's turned off but has its light on. If it's really quite cold in your house, you can boil a kettle of water and then put the whole kettle in the off oven.
   • Check on it at 10pm.
     • If it's fully ripe, that means your cold and unfed starter achieved ripeness in 6 hours. Your starter is now warm and active, so another 1:1:1 feeding now will take even less time, and you'll miss the 8am connection you're hoping to make. So feed it again, but now with a 1:4:4 ratio (1 part starter, 4 parts flour, 4 parts water). The idea is to give your starter a bunch more land to conquer this time, which will slow it down so it only reaches its peak at ~8am the next morning.
     • If it's not fully ripe at 10pm, check it at midnight. Depending on how ripe it is then, give it a 1:3:3, 1:2:2, or 1:1:1 feed.

3. At 8am, start following the sourdough recipe.

4. You will have some time between folds. In that time, feed your starter again such that it is ripe at 4pm.

5. You should be done with your four folds by 9:30am. Stick the whole bowl, covered with clingwrap, in a warm spot.

6. At 11am, proceed by tipping the dough into the pan. I think making King Arthur's parchment sling is super silly and I'd skip it. Wrap the pan tightly in clingwrap using a cater-wrap and stick it back in a warm spot. This dough will be ready for your students in 5 hours.

7. At noon, rinse your bowl and start following the non-sourdough recipe.

   • I have one opinionated divergence versus King Arthur's recipe: they call for instant yeast, but I think it's weird to ask your students to get this relatively specialized ingredient. Switch to active dry yeast. The swap is 1:1, but as a first step you should divert a quarter cup of the called-for warm water into a small bowl and bloom your active dry yeast. Then proceed as normal.

8. You should be done with your four folds by 1:30pm. Stick the whole bowl, covered with clingwrap, in a warm spot.

9. At 2:30pm, tip the dough into the second pan, cater-wrap it, and put it in a warm spot. This dough will be ready for your students in 90 minutes.

Primetime

1. At 4pm, pre-heat your oven. If you've been using your oven as the warm spot for all the resting, pull your pans out and set them on the range.

2. As students arrive, ask them to carefully note the marshmallowy texture of the dough. This texture is a visual cue that students need to look for in general, so it's worth pointing out now. Speak a little about how, although the two pans may look the same at present, it took vastly different lengths of time to get them that way!

3. On paper, sketch two 3x3 grids. Have students stake some territory on paper and then decorate the corresponding territory on a loaf. The first two students get the honor of dimpling the loaves, I guess. Having a total of 12 students is nice because that gives everyone their own custom square of one style of bread, plus a taste of the other style of bread from a common square. Those are marked CS below, and you should decorate them yourself, erring on the side of simplicity so that the bread can shine.

SK	CS	MM	gap gap	FF	CS	AY
ET	CS	JG		KF	CS	MR
TS	CS	AT		JB	CS	DJ

4. Put your loaves in to bake.

5. The loaves will bake for 15 minutes or so, which is a perfect length of time to... you guessed it, mix up another loaf. The point of this is not just the pursuit of endless pain (that is an excellent pun if you say the last word in French). The point is to give your students the chance to put in some folds. You have three choices as a teacher.

   1. Skip this step. You'll still be Teacher of the Year. It's fine if your students don't get to experience a fold.
   2. Have your students mix a yeast dough.
   3. Have your students mix a sourdough dough. This is no harder in the moment, but it takes more babysitting later.

6. Regardless of your choice above, at least pass your starter around to your students and have them note its look, smell, volume, and bubbly activity. Have them give it a 1:1:1 maintenance feed.

7. Pull your loaves out. Split each loaf into nine, and additionally halve the six common squares so that everyone gets to try both the sourdough and yeast varieties of bread. Set out good olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Rejoice in the miracle of fresh bread. Have students reflect on the differences between the two loaves.

8. If you chose to do step 5.2 or 5.3 above, have the students put in folds every 15 minutes. Have them note how the dough gains strength each time. Talk about underproofing and overproofing. Note that your oven, even if immediately turned off, is now too hot to serve as a warm spot for bread to rest between folds.

9. Once folks are done eating, you can send a student off with the third dough, if one was made. It can either be folded a few more times and baked soon, or stuck in the fridge and returned to later. It's also a nice idea to have a few little jars at hand so you can give students their own starter!

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