Focaccia that’s even easier to make than it is to spell.
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I have a bread addiction. I eat it every day. In fact, I could not survive a day without it.
Yet when the pandemic hit and everyone started cranking out the sourdough I had an acute case of performance anxiety. I can keep two kids, two cats, a worm farm and a large number of pot plants alive. But I do not have it in me to keep a jar of swirling whirling yeast cells in good health so that I can spend the best part of my day weighing, mixing, kneading, shaping, resting, proofing and baking a loaf, and the rest of the day cleaning the flour clouds off every surface of my kitchen. It’s simply too much pressure for me.
So instead, I bake focaccia using the foolproof Bon Appétit recipe for “Shockingly Easy No-Knead Focaccia”. This is dead-set the easiest way to make bread, it’s fancier than a loaf, can be interpreted in a lot of ways with added ingredients, and you can store the ingredients in a cupboard for months, possibly years, rather than devote your energies to regularly worrying about and feeding another mouth (the starter) in the household.
Trust me you won’t look back.
Very simple ingredients. Yeast, honey, flour, salt oil and water.
In a nutshell, place 2 and 1/4 teaspoons of dry yeast into 2 and 1/2 cups of warm water with 2 teaspoons of honey and give it a good whisk. Let it sit and go bubbly for five minutes before adding five cups of all-purpose flour to the water with one tablespoon of salt.
Give it a bit of a stir until it forms a rough dough (no need to knead, just make sure the flour and water are roughly combined).
Stir all your ingredients together roughly. Then chuck it into a bowl with liberal amounts of olive oil.
THAT’S IT IN TERMS OF THE RECIPE FOLKS! Can you believe it?
Then transfer the dough into a well-oiled bowl (note: focaccia-making is no time to scrimp on your best extra virgin olive oil. You need to pour that stuff with gusto, or, to use a more culinary measurement, add in around four tablespoons) and leave it to rise.
The dough after a few hours. She hath risen!
The official recipe recommends between 8-24 hours in the fridge. I, however, leave it out on the kitchen bench for about two hours or until the dough has doubled in size. Then it’s time to get a fork and turn it over in the bowl a few times to deflate it before placing it in a large and buttered baking dish. Then leave it for another hour or two to expand again. That is it people. It is time time to pour more olive oil on top and dig those fingers in to create craters all over the dough. A liberal sprinkle of salt and then shove it in a 180 degree oven for around 25 minutes (or until it is your preferred shade of golden.)
The fun bit is when you get your hands in it.
Pull it out and it will slide out of the pan onto a rack to cool. I then melt some extra butter with some crushed garling to pour all over the top. Then cut it up and eat it.
It will taste deliciously oily and salty all on its own but you can also add rosemary and garlic prior to baking for a bit of pizazz. Similarly you could chuck in some black olives and semi-dried tomatoes prior to baking, or sprinkle cheese over the top, and currently doing the reel rounds is a focaccia with corn and chives. Nobody in my family wants to mess with the original recipe but I am going to sneak some variations in there whether they like it or not.
If someone wants to invent a room spray that replicates the smell of fresh-baked focaccia then I would like to share in the royalties…
I like to serve it with pesto and chili oil for dipping, as well as some tomatoes, avo and prosciutto. One time there was a tiny slither left which I toasted for breakfast the next morning and had with butter. But usually every last piece gets eaten within the hour of it being taken out of the oven.
