Focaccia Bread

How to Make Focaccia Bread

When I think focaccia bread I think thick soft chunks of herby oily bread with a light golden crust. That is exactly what Peter Reinhardt delivered in his focaccia recipe from

The Bread Baker’s Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread. This is our newest cookbook acquisition and we couldn’t be more pleased with the results of the recipes we have tried so far. The focaccia recipe is on page 164-65 of the book.
One of the first breads that Nick ever made was a focaccia recipe from King Arthur Flour. It was delicious and he made it multiple times. However, I remember thinking that it didn’t seem like authentic focaccia that I sometimes get in Italian restaurants or pizzerias. It seemed too thin and chewy. So when this came out of the oven so thick and fluffy, I was super excited and pleased.

Follow up:

There are actually 2 versions of the focaccia recipe in The Bread Baker’s Apprentice; focaccia and poolish focaccia. We made the poolish focaccia since we had the time and wanted a really flavorful dough. The recipe calls for 3 cups of poolish, which is almost exactly the yield we got out of 1 poolish recipe. Excellent! I love it when things work out like that.
If you are unfamiliar with pre ferment techniques, a poolish is a spongy dough that has equal amounts of flour and water with a small amount of yeast. When mixed it resembles the consistency of pancake batter. The poolish ferments at room temperature for a few hours and then sits in the fridge overnight, or up to 3 days. Pre ferment techniques are used to impart a more complex flavor to the dough.
Here is our poolish after a night in the fridge. You should let it rest for about an hour at room temperature before using it in a dough.

The actual focaccia dough contains the poolish, bread flour, salt, instant yeast, olive oil, and water. Pretty simple.
Once mixed, turn the soft and sticky dough onto a well floured counter and dust the top liberally with flour. Pat it into a rectangle and then let it rest for about 5 minutes.
Then the dough gets stretched to about twice its size from end to end, and folded up letter style.
So you fold one end in to about the middle of the rectangle:

Then fold the other end in to meet the first fold in the middle of the rectangle:

Then fold one end over the other:

Now spray the dough with a light mist of oil, dust with flour, cover and allow to rest on the counter for 30 minutes. Then, you do the whole stretch and fold ordeal again. Reinhardt actually calls to do it three times, but we only did two stretch and folds.
Once all your folding is done, the dough ferments for another hour until it swells:

Then it is spread out on a baking sheet (use parchment paper underneath if your baking sheet is not non-stick). You spread the dough with your finger tips, by dimpling and spreading from the center out. Be sure that you maintain a somewhat even thickness and do this gently as not to tear your beautiful dough. If the dough is too springy and is not spreading nicely, allow it to rest for 10-15 minutes and then finish. It is okay if you cannot get the dough to fill the entire pan to the edges, because it will spread out as it relaxes and proofs.
It should look something like this when you are done.

In addition to the 6 tbsp olive oil in the dough, Reinhardt also calls for 1/4 - 1/2 cup of herb oil on the bread. We chose to go with rosemary, though you could really use any herbs you fancy. We made the herb oil by chopping up a bunch of fresh rosemary and soaking it in 6 tbsp of olive oil overnight in the fridge. My brain associates focaccia bread with rosemary for some reason, so the choice was easy. I think the rosemary and focaccia bread are a match made in heaven. (They go together like lamb and tuna fish. Maybe you like spaghetti and meatball? You more comfortable with that analogy? Gold star if you can place that.)
Now is the time to add any pre-proof toppings such as sun dried tomatoes, olives, roasted garlic, fresh herbs, nuts, sauteed mushrooms or other veggies. We added our herb oil and chopped up fresh rosemary. This gets covered and proofs for about 2 hours.

About 15 minutes before baking you can add more herb or regular olive oil to the top (we added some more, not sure how much). This bread is a treat, not an everyday thing, so don’t skimp on the oil. It makes the bread even more rich and delicious. This would also be the point where you would add pre-bake toppings such as cheese and cooked meats. Some coarse salt is also added at this time.
Give the dough another good dimpling with your finger tips and allow it to rest again for 15-30 minutes to allow the gas to build back up.
Place in a preheated 500F oven and then turn the heat down to 450F. This will bake for about 15-20 minutes, turning once 180 degrees for even baking.
Once it has turned a light golden brown color, remove it from the oven and immediately place it on a wire rack to cool for at least 20 minutes before cutting into it. The aroma of this bread is intoxicating, so good luck waiting that long to rip a chunk off the end to try!

We ate a ton of this with dinner the night we made it, and continued eating chunks over the next few days. This bread is definitely best eaten within a day or so of baking. It was still delicious on day 3 or 4, but noticeably less so.
This recipe makes a hearty helping of bread. If you are going to go through the trouble of making it, I would make a full recipe, but perhaps freeze half of it to eat at another time.
Source:  http://www.imafoodblog.com/index.php/2009/07/15/how-to-make-focaccia-bread