An Idiot's Guide to Focaccia
The Recipe
Ingredients
For the dough:
2½ cups (600 grams) lukewarm water
½ teaspoon active dry yeast
2½ teaspoons (15 grams) honey
5 1/3 cups (800 grams) all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon (10 grams) fine sea salt, plus more for finishing
For the brine:
1½ teaspoons (5 grams) Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt
⅓ cup (80 grams) lukewarm water
For the optional garlic-herb olive oil:
¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil
2 garlic cloves, finely minced
1 tablespoon chopped fresh thyme or 1 teaspoon dried
1 tablespoon chopped fresh rosemary or 1 teaspoon dried
1/4 teaspoon fresh ground black pepper
Method
Ideally, you want to get some of this work done ahead of time. I recommend starting your dough the day before you want to bake it, ideally around 9 pm so you can bake it in time for lunch the next day! If you are using the garlic and herbs, I also recommend steeping them in the oil for at least 24 hours. This recipe is still absolutely DELICIOUS without them!
Day One
Mix water, yeast, and honey in a small bowl until honey dissolves. In another small bowl, mix olive oil with optional accoutrement. In a very large bowl, whisk together flour and salt until well combined.
Add honey/yeast mixture and olive oil to the flour and mix with a spatula or wooden spoon until just combined. Scrape sides clean and cover the bowl with plastic wrap.
Leave out at room temperature to ferment for 12 to 14 hours. Don’t be scared of the word ferment! It literally just means proofing in this context.
Day Two (or 12 to 14 hours later)
Spread at least three tablespoons of olive oil (NOT the herby one!) on a large rimmed baking sheet. When dough is ready, gently release it from the sides of the bowl using your hands or a spatula, and pour/drop onto prepared baking sheet.
Drizzle about two tablespoons of olive oil (again, NOT the herby one) over dough and use your fingers to rub it in, and then gently coax the dough towards the corner of your pan. It probably won’t go all the way, so…
Over the course of the next thirty minutes or so, stretch the dough into the corners once or twice. After that, dimple the dough by using pads of your fingers (minus your thumb) and pressing in at an angle all over.
Mix up the brine in a small bowl, then pour over the dough. Don’t worry if it pools in the dimples you just made - you actually want that! Proof again for 45 minutes.
Ten or fifteen minutes (depending on the average time it takes your oven to heat up) into this final proof, place a pizza stone (or inverted baking sheet) on the middle rack of your oven and preheat to 450º.
Once the dough is light and bubbly, sprinkle it with flaky salt and place it in the oven directly on top of the stone or baking sheet and bake for 25 to 30 minutes until bottom crust is crisp and golden brown when checked with a spatula. To finish baking, place on upper rack and bake for 4 to 6 minutes more.
When the focaccia is done baking, brush or drizzle with more olive oil (or a second batch of the herby olive oil!) and allow to cool for five minutes.
Release focaccia from pan and transfer to a wire rack to cool completely, or dig in when it’s still warm! While I recommend eating the whole thing (it’s not hard!) the same day, you can wrap it in parchment paper and store in the fridge or freezer to be reheated when needed. You’ll lose the crispy bottom, but the flavor will still be there!
The Story
I gotta admit, bread making has always been a skill that eludes me. When Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat came out on Netflix, I became enamored with Samin Nosrat’s style of presenting cooking as a science, an art form, and a story. In the first episode, she visits a Ligurian olive farm and makes a plain focaccia that is the basis for the recipe above. It wasn’t until almost a year later that I finally got the book as a gift from my soon-to-be mother-in-law.
I have learned an incredible amount from her book, and I haven’t even finished it yet. My greatest takeaway so far is that you need good salt and you need good olive oil. Samin praises Diamond Crystal kosher salt, calling it “one of the least salty salts there is”. I can’t say that my palate hasn’t quite learned to discern the difference in saltiness, but I can say that Diamond Crystal certainly tastes cleaner than other salts. If that makes sense. I don’t know. You have to try it and compare for yourself! As far as finishing salt goes, I must admit I’m a sucker for Maldon flaky sea salt for this focaccia. And, well, anything that you sprinkle salt on.
But that’s salt. As far as olive oil goes, I can absolutely taste the difference between high and low quality. Olive oil can be a little odd on its own, but when it is such a staple in so many dishes, you gotta go for higher quality stuff. Especially when making focaccia! My current favorite is Lucini olive oil. Honestly, I only started using it at first because I thought the bottle was pretty. And then I started noticing it in some of my favorite cooking shows, like Binging with Babish and Bon Appetit’s videos. And then, of course, Brad Leone went and MADE the damn stuff on It’s Alive! As if it couldn’t get any better, the next episode was with the queen of this recipe herself.
I knew then that one day I would try to make focaccia. I went into this a little intimidated (just like with yogurt, new post coming soon!), but my determination to see what all the fuss was about outweighed that. Come last Thursday, I took the plunge and enjoyed every moment of it. My first batch was a little rough (re: slightly burned but still partially salvageable) because my oven here in the apartment is a piece of shit, but I learned from my first batch, and I’d like to think I NAILED my second!
While this bread is amazing on its own, it’s also great for making sandwiches. While you could go old school with your meats and cheeses, I took it up a notch and made myself a sandwich with a very mild lacy swiss, some excellent sopressata, some fancy mortadella, and even more olive oil.
Sweet Mother Teresa on the hood of a Mercedes Benz, I went to another dimension eating that sandwich. Obviously that’s a hyperbole, but seriously. This bread is incredible no matter how you choose to serve it.
