Focaccia

(Adapted from My Bread)

While I don’t eat bread often, I am always making bread – just because I love baking breads. I have very happy bread-loving friends who benefit from my regular bread making.

Focaccia is a flat, Italian, oven-baked bread. The dough is flavoured with olive oil and sometimes topped with herbs and vegetables. You can make savoury or sweet Focaccia. The most popular herb with which to top Focaccia is fresh rosemary but other toppings that you can use are olives, tomatoes, caramelized onions and scallions/green onions. A light sprinkling of sea salt is quite a delight when biting into the dimpled bread.

Focaccia can be eaten as is, dunked in soup or sliced to make sandwiches. I generally eat it just as is, because it is that good on its own!

To make this bread, use a high quality of olive oil. If you don’t have olive oil, do what I did on one occasion and that is to make my own herbed oil to make Focaccia. I made rosemary oil.

To make the herb oil, put ½ cup of vegetable, canola or grapeseed oil in a pan along 3 tablespoons fresh rosemary leaves, chopped roughly. Put the pan with the oil and herb on the lowest possible heat and warm gently until fragrant. It will take about 5 – 8 minutes depending on the size of your burner. Do not let the oil get overly hot and start to fry the herbs. You will notice that the leaves turn a darker shade of green, that’s okay. Pour the oil into a bowl and let cool completely.

SPECIAL EQUIPMENT

1 (13 x 18-inch) sheet pan

INGREDIENTS

• 1 cup of peeled, chopped Yukon Gold potatoes (do not use russet potatoes)
• 2 ½ cups water (you may need more or less depending on the type/brand of flour you are using and the temperature where you are)
• 4 ½ cups all-purpose flour
• 2 ½ teaspoons instant yeast
• 1 teaspoon sugar (brown or white)
• 1 ½ teaspoons fine table salt, divided in half
• 1/3 cup extra virgin olive, grapeseed, canola or vegetable oil (I used an herb oil)

DIRECTIONS

1. Boil the potatoes with the 2 ½ cups water until a knife inserts easily. Puree/blend the potatoes and water until smooth and let cool to 120 degrees F.
2. Mix together the flour, yeast, sugar and half of the salt in a large bowl.
3. Pour the potato mixture into the flour and using a wooden spoon or your hands, mix the ingredients together until you have a wet, sticky dough (this will take about 30 seconds). Cover the bowl and let it sit at room temperature until the dough has tripled in size, about 2 – 2 ½ hours (longer the weather is cool).
4. Lightly oil the baking pan. Using a rubber spatula or bowl scraper, scrape the dough onto the pan; the dough will still be loose and sticky. Gently pull and stretch the dough across the surface of the pan. Oil your hands well and press the dough evenly out to the edges. Drizzle the dough with 3 tablespoons of oil (along with the herbs) and sprinkle it with the remaining salt. Use your fingertips to create dimples all over the surface of the dough.
5. Set aside the dough and let it rise in a warm, draft-free place until it has risen just over the edges of the pan, about 45 minutes to 1 hour.
6. 20 minutes before the end of the second rise, preheat the oven to 400 degrees F with the rack in the middle.
7. Gently place the Focaccia into the oven and bake for 30 – 45 minutes or until the top is evenly golden brown. The risen dough at this stage is very delicate so be gentle when transferring to the oven, a bump going into the oven could cause it to collapse).
8. Transfer the pan to a cooling rack and let rest for 12 – 15 minutes before slicing and serving warm or at room temperature.

NOTE

• If you are using olive oil and not the flavoured oil I did, then simply sprinkle the fresh herbs over the dough at direction # 4. It is at this stage you would add any other toppings you were planning to use – tomatoes, olives etc.