Let’s Bake Focaccia
Let’s Make Focaccia
Focaccia is a flatbread from Italy. In my opinion, it’s the flatbread from Italy. It’s one of those breads that is ultimately customizable. I don’t like to put too much stuff of mine because I love the crispy crust. I want that to shine through. Otherwise, you are on to pizza. Can you make pizza with this dough? You sure can! In fact, it’s wonderful dough for so many applications.
But let’s just start with the basics. In fact the name even implies basic. The name comes from the root focus. The focus of the body is the heart. Where’s the heart of any ancient home? It’s the hearth. In Roman homes, the focus of the home was the hearth. The fire kept burning all day and all night. So this is where the bread was made as well. It was often baked in covered cast iron pans or what we might call the Dutch oven today. It could be mixed up easily and left to rise to be ready for dinner time. It could be baked quickly for a crisp and brown crust or slowly for a softer crumb and crust.
What are the basic ingredients?
Chef Tom Focaccia
Bread flour 100% 500g
Water or milk 75% 375g
Olive oil 10% 50g
Kosher salt 2% 10g
Instant yeast 1.4% 7g
Early in the mixing, it is a shaggy dough. I used sourdough starter for the leavening. (20%) And I used 20% whole wheat for this focaccia.
Prepared half-sheet pan: olive oil
Bench scraper
Stainless steel bowl for mixing
Straight dough method
You’ll notice I suggest using water or milk. If you want a softer crumb, use milk. It’s quite nice. I learned this from a great executive chef I once had, David Wennerlyn. He taught me so much about Italian food and baking. We worked on this focaccia at Tra Via, a restaurant on Lincoln Avenue in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago. It’s gone now, but in the early nineties, it was amazing. He taught me this bread with milk in it. I had never seen that done. It still gets a great exterior crust on it but the interior is amazingly soft. Either way, this bread is fun to play with.
I made a levain of 50g sour starter, 100g each of flour and water.
Combine the flour, liquids and instant yeast in a bowl and mix to a shaggy dough. It will seem like it’s way too sticky. That’s because it is sticky. Don’t worry. It will get better with more gluten development. That is something to remember, more development of gluten will alleviate stickiness. Let the sticky dough sit for an hour to hydrate. After that hour, you can stretch the dough out with wet hands. It will still seem way too wet to hold together. Keep your hands wet. Sprinkle the salt over the stretched out dough. Fold the dough in thirds. You may need to use a bench scraper to aid in this operation. If you would like to add herbs to this dough, this would be a good place to do it. Just sprinkle the herbs like the salt and fold the dough in thirds again. Place the dough back in the bowl. Repeat the stretch-and-fold three more times over the next two hours and you will have beautiful stretchy dough. It should be elastic and extensible. You can either pour the dough into a prepared half-sheet pan or leave it to ferment overnight in the refrigerator. Whichever you choose to do, place the dough in the prepared pan and fold in thirds. Let it rest for 20 minutes. Then you should be able to stretch it out a bit to get a slightly more rectangular shape. Gently press the dough out to your desired thickness. I like to go about half-inch thick. Then give it some more time to rise, usually about another hour. I like to let it really puff up as I don’t have to worry about shaping.
Right before baking. Using a bit more olive oil here enhances the crust crispiness. Dimpling keeps the bread the same thickness.
You can pre-heat the oven to 450°F at this time. Right before baking, I like to brush with more olive oil and dimple the bread with all ten fingers. Bake it for about 25-30 minutes or until you reach the desired color of crust that you like. I like mine pretty dark. If you have baked it long enough, it should have a good brown bottom crust on it and should slip right out of the pan on to a cooling rack. Give it a few minutes before cutting the bread into squares. Enjoy the olive oil goodness of this bread.
I want to leave you with one extra idea for this bread. If you have watched the show, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat on Netflix, you will be treated to a technique I had never seen before. In the first episode, she’s baking with a Ligurian focaccia maker. He mixes up a solution of water, olive oil and salt. They call this the brine. Once the dough is ready for final proof, they pour this solution over the dimpled dough and get ready to bake. It seems as though this might make the dough too wet. But what it does is steam the dough early in baking and leave behind a crispier and slightly salty crust. You don’t have to try this technique on your first go with focaccia but I recommend trying it after you have the basic focaccia technique down. (https://youtu.be/6pHsAgDgRHE)
The bottom line with focaccia is to let the dough ferment enough to get a very open crumb and to bake long enough to get a crispy crust. Experiment and find your focaccia.
Chef Tom
