This uses the same overnight dough as my classic flaky sea salt focaccia, just pushed to a wetter hydration and finished with cherry tomatoes instead of salt alone. Same method, different topping, and honestly, once you've made it once, you'll understand why I keep coming back to it.
Why 80% hydration
Baker's percentage is just water divided by flour. My usual pizza dough runs 70%, which is already sticky. Focaccia goes to 80%, which means for every 500 grams of flour, you're using 400 grams of water instead of 350. That extra water is the whole trick.
More water means more steam in the oven, and that's what gives you the contrast that makes focaccia focaccia: a shattery, crisp top with a soft, almost custardy crumb underneath. It also means an open, irregular crumb full of big air pockets, and dough that stays fresh longer than a low-hydration bread.
The tradeoff is that this dough is genuinely difficult to handle. It's sticky, it's slack, and it will fight you if you try to treat it like a normal dough ball. That's not a mistake. That's the point.
No sweetener, and here's why
There's no sugar in this recipe because it doesn't need any. Yeast doesn't need sugar to activate or thrive, contrary to what a lot of recipes assume. Sugar just speeds things up, and with an overnight ferment, speed isn't what we're after.
During that long, slow rise, enzymes in the flour and the yeast break the starches down into simple sugars on their own. That's what builds flavor and browning. Sugar's already handled before you ever add it.
The dough
- 700g bread flour or all-purpose flour (organic, ideally Central Milling)
- 560g room temperature water
- 15g sea salt
- 2g active dry yeast
Whisk your dry ingredients together first, yeast and flour, keeping the salt separate until you add water so it doesn't come into direct contact with the yeast. No need to bloom the yeast. Add the water, mix until combined, and let it sit at room temperature for 24 hours.
Want to skip the measuring? Our 72-Hour Dough Mix comes pre-portioned with this exact organic flour and hydration, just add water.
Why we fold instead of knead
At 80% hydration, this dough is too slack to knead. You can't work it on a counter the way you would a stiffer dough, it'll just stick to everything.
Instead: get your hands wet, not floured, wet. Pick the dough up and fold it over itself two or three times, building layers without tightening it into a ball. That's it. You're not developing new structure here, you're just gently gathering enough strength to move it into the pan.
Shaping and the first stretch
Oil a sheet pan heavily, place the dough in, and stretch it toward the corners with oiled hands. Let it resist and pull back rather than forcing it all the way. Cover loosely with plastic wrap so it doesn't develop a skin, then let it rest and rise again for two to three hours, until it's visibly domed and full of air.
Dimple, top, and bake
Right before baking, press your fingers all the way down through the dough to the pan, all over, to make deep dimples. This is what actually creates the surface texture, not the shaping earlier. Press halved cherry tomatoes into the dimples, drizzle with olive oil, and finish with a flaky sea salt.
I baked this one at 425°F, and that's a good number. 450°F works too. I go back and forth on this myself, there's no single right answer here. Some of that's me still experimenting, some of it's just knowing the range works. Pick one, watch the color more than the clock, and you'll be fine either way. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, convection if you have it. If your oven runs uneven heat toward the back, rotate the pan halfway through.
Here's the part that actually makes this work: preheat a Baking Steel on the rack underneath your sheet tray for at least 45 minutes to an hour beforehand, so it's fully absorbed the heat, not just warmed on the surface. Set the sheet tray directly on top of it. That steel is blasting even, steady heat up into the bottom of the pan the whole time it bakes, and combined with the olive oil you've got pooled underneath the dough, that's what gives you a bottom crust that's genuinely crisp and golden, not just pale and steamed the way focaccia turns out on a bare rack.
A few things worth knowing
Can I freeze it? Yes. If your schedule doesn't line up with bake day, portion the dough into balls after fermenting, wrap well, and freeze. Thaw in the fridge overnight, then bring to room temperature for an hour or two before shaping.
Do I need a specific pan? Any heavy sheet pan or a 9x13 cake pan works. A quarter-sheet tray is my go-to, useful for a dozen other things in the kitchen too.
Is it bad if some bubbles collapse when I dimple it? No, that's normal. It's not over-fermentation, just air pockets popping naturally as you press in.
There's no single right way to build this dough. I'm always tweaking it. Try it once, exactly as written, and then start experimenting.
About the Author
Andris Lagsdin
Andris Lagsdin
I invented the Baking Steel in 2012 after reading a single paragraph in the Wall Street Journal about Modernist Cuisine. I was standing in my family's steel fabrication plant in Hanover, MA and thought: steel conducts heat 18X better than ceramic. What would that do to a pizza?
Twelve years later I'm still in the kitchen, still obsessing over dough, and still convinced that the best results come from removing complexity, not adding it. That's the whole idea behind the 72-Hour Dough Mix too, one mix, pre-measured, no guesswork, just the same dough I make at home.
One mix. One mess. Just add time.
