Project 13: Focaccia

Prepare your flour! These next few projects will include my favorite bread recipes. My love of making bread started when I ventured into sour dough as one of my annual hobbies. For a long time, I thought the only bread I was capable of making was sour dough but the addition of a bread maker to my life and the desire/necessity to make bread at home during covid really brought some variety to my bread making. Over the next couple weeks, I’ll cover my top bread recipes as well as any modifications I make to them, too, so get your flour ready to follow along!

Quick project summary: I never thought to make focaccia at home until a coworker sent me photos of some she made a couple months back. I assumed focaccia was very complex previously but when she shared the recipe I was shocked – no kneading and very few ingredients despite the rich flavor. For focaccia, I use this recipe from bon appetit.

In terms of modifications, a few things to be aware of:

-I use the quick rise method! Our fridge is always too full to sit bread in there to rise overnight. And, this is surprisingly quick rising. I’ve made this recipe about 5-7 times and I started noticing that although the first rise is 3-4 hours, it is often ready after 2.

-For the first rise, definitely make sure to get full coverage of olive oil on the dough. It’s very sticky and will stick to your silicon or plastic wrap very easily.

-When I’ve made this, I’m often freezing all or at least part of it to give to a friend later. With that in mind, I skip the garlic butter on top and instead add rosemary to the bread before I bake it. On top of the freezing, the bread is already pretty rich with olive oil and I personally think the garlic butter may be too much moisture on the bread.

Things I loved about this project: The process of making this focaccia is both easy and fun – if you follow along, you’ll see in the recipe that you get to put the wrinkles in the bread after the second rise by poking your fingers on the risen dough. Usually, I’m being so cautious with my bread dough after it rises and so the chance to make a mess and not have to worry about deflating my bread was weirdly fun.

The recipe is also very forgiving. There have been one or two times I’ve thought I had too much or too little flour or the dough didn’t quite feel the same yet the end product was still great. And finally, I don’t always eat a ton of my baked goods but this focaccia is a bread I love to eat – both plain or dipped in some olive oil or even marinara sauce.

What I would do differently: So far, I’ve only tried this recipe using the baking sheet method for a thinner focaccia. I’d really like to try the 9 by 13 pan to get a thicker bread sometime soon but given how quickly and how much this rises, I haven’t done the 9 by 13 version.

Things I also enjoyed while doing this project:

-Watching episodes of Never Have I Ever on Netflix

-Drinking lemon spindrifts (and being basic)

-Multitasking while baking on conference calls