Focaccia? I Barely Know Ya
Yeah I really couldn’t think of anything else.
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Focaccia
By: Hallie Koontz
You may be wondering: when was FOCACCIA ever mentioned in QF? You would be right to wonder this, because the answer is never. I just wanted to do something with olives for Sera that was “basic” (if it isn’t a contraption she’s got no time for it) but also wasn’t just A Bowl of Olives. I figured that if she made bread she’d put olives on top of it the way you sometimes do with focaccia, and also: I wanted focaccia. The stars aligned.
So, not focaccia, but olives:
SERA
Oh Elee, Elee! Did you get the components?ELEE
Yeah, and this ridiculous number of olives. Sera, I still don't understand that part.SERA
Oh, that's--KYLE
And she pops one in her mouth.SERA
That's brain juice.
To prepare, I looked up some basic focaccia recipes, specifically no-knead ones, even though pounding the bread would probably be Sera’s favorite part of the process. I just couldn’t be bothered with something that kneaded kneading.
GET IT?
Anyway here are the recipes I used:
Shockingly Easy No-Knead Focaccia Recipe | Bon Appétit (bonappetit.com)
No Knead Focaccia (Crazy Easy) - Cooking With Ayeh
My modifications were swapping out the honey in that first recipe for straight sugar, which I based on the amount that’s given in the second recipe; opting to oil the pan instead of buttering it; and using pink Himalayan salt because I like it better than sea salt. I fudged the times just a little, too. I spent at least an hour going through these recipes, combining them into one that would suit my purposes.
And then I lost it.
I lost my recipe.
Could I have gone online and done all the work again? Yes. Would this have been even quicker than the first time since I’d already done it once? Also yes. Did I do this? No. Instead of taking an additional hour to fix my mistakes, I spent a week being angry about it.
Unable to find my original recipe or stomach the thought of going through the work again, I drifted around my home like a ghost, picking things up and putting them back down in desperation and shame, looking at the tabs I still had open on my laptop and thinking: I can’t read these again. I did this step. I put in the work. Please.
And then, in a burst of inspiration on a Saturday morning, I thought to check my desk, where I store several manila folders relating to my work. One of them is brand new, and that one is called “America’s Quest Kitchen,” and in that folder there was one item, and that item was the focaccia recipe.
And so now I approach this focaccia with all the frustrated energy Sera uses on a machine that isn’t working. Enjoy.
SATURDAY
OK, so. Recipe says to combine the yeast, sugar, and some lukewarm water. I whisked the combo with my cute little green whisk and then let it sit for 5 minutes as instructed while I prepped everything else.
I did not do a good job of the prep part, which I’ll get to in a second, but here’s what it looked like after the 5 minutes (apparently it should be “foamy,” and I decided it was):
So. The prep. First, I had to use a ladle to get the flour out of the bag, which was just an extremely silly and arduous process. But not nearly as silly and arduous as the salt. I was so excited about using Himalayan salt because it’s PINK and it’s more EXCITING than sea salt, but I didn’t realize that I had gotten the grinder version. This meant I had to grind the crystals into the teaspoon.
I tried. I really did. Here’s a video that sucks because it was just me propping up my phone against my sugar jar:
But no. Couldn’t do it.* So I switched to REGULAR SALT, which isn’t even SEA SALT.
*Maya, in all his infinite wisdom, asked me after the fact why I didn’t just grind a large amount of salt into a bowl and then measure teaspoons from that instead of grinding the salt painstakingly into the teaspoon itself. Friends: I don’t know. That would have worked.
ANYWAY. The flour and the salt were added to the mixing bowl, then mixed into a “shaggy dough” using this weird blue spikey thing my roommate had because I couldn’t find my mixing spatula.
The next step is to add the dough to a bowl that’s been filled with oil, so I did that thing.
And, readers: I really chose the wrong bowls here. I don’t know why I didn’t mix all the ingredients in the BOWL THAT’S MADE FOR MIXING and then put the dough in the BOWL THAT’S MADE FOR SERVING AND STORING, but that is not what I chose here. No, no, I chose to mix in the bowl with the low sides so all the stuff kept spilling over, and then I chose to squeeze the bread that’s supposed to rise into this narrow, high-sided batter bowl.
But look how cute the bowl looks covered with my little lemon cloth cover:
The next step is to let the dough rise in the fridge for 8 hours. Mine’s going to rise for much longer, because it’s like 6 pm and I’m not waking up at 2 am to bake this. That’s a late morning task.
SUNDAY
It is now Sunday morning. I woke up at 9 but went back to sleep until 10. I got up to make some coffee and remove the dough from the fridge, but then I fell asleep again waiting for the coffee to percolate. Now it’s 10:30 and my coffee is cold and I’m miserable.
But the dough looks good! It rose a LOT (don’t know what I expected), so maybe it’s a good thing I used the bowls I did.
The next step according to my no-knead recipe is to do what I have dubbed “cheat kneading” (or cheading), which is to take two forks, gently fold the dough farthest away from you toward the middle, and then to repeat that twice, turning the bowl a quarter turn each time. You should end up with a rough little ball, supposedly.
So now I’m supposed to wait for this to rise uncovered for . . . 1.5 to 4 hours. Forgot you had to let it rise AGAIN. Okay.
. . .
It is now approximately 1:30. The dough’s been rising for ~3-ish hours. Here’s what it looks like now. It looks about the same as when I took it out of the fridge, and I forgot to take a picture.
The next step is to prep your pan. The recipes I’m basing this on call for a 13 x 9 baking pan, and at least one of them said to “generously butter” the pan before putting the dough in. I chose to oil it instead:
Moving the dough was surprisingly fun. I’m not sure I did a very good job dimpling it because I admittedly have no concept of what I’m supposed to do for that (I guess just stick my fingers in to make little holes???). I just, uh. Dragged my fork back and forth across the top.
You can top focaccia with pretty much anything you want, but for my purposes I chose some classics: mozzarella, rosemary, PINK HIMALAYAN SALT, and, of course, olives. I probably could have cut the olives or something, but instead I just plopped those suckers straight on top, like Sera probably would:
Then I baked it at 450°F for 20 minutes (the original recipes say 20 to 30). At 20 minutes I didn’t think it looked quite done:
I also should have moved my top oven rack out of the way first because I just didn’t realize it would rise SO MUCH? But by that point the rack was too hot to like, safely store it anywhere, so it stayed, and I just hoped for the best after putting the bread back in for 5 minutes.
That turned out to be just about perfect. It was soft to the touch but sprung back a little when I poked it, and the cheese had melted into a crusty crust. Voila! The final product!
I left the bread to cool for like 10 minutes before running a knife along the edge of the pan to make sure it didn’t stick. And then I was like, yeah, this is cool and solid enough to cut. It wasn’t. I imagine Sera has also ruined the edge of the bread by cutting in too soon.*
It was. Fine. Really crusty on the outside and really moist on the inside, which are good things, but it was almost too much of both? I’d prefer a little less crusty AND a little less moist.** The cheese tasted really good mixed with the bread though.
I could probably cut down on the oil in both the pan and the bowl at least a little. Also, the more I ate the more I realized how salty it was—so maybe I’ll cut down on that by a teaspoon or two for next time. And olives are already pretty salty, so maybe the topping salt could just be nixed.
*OK correction: As I got further into the middle of the bread, the crust got better. This must be like how the inside brownies are always the best.
**A further correction because time and proper tense shifts don’t exist in this post: I brought this to my sister’s, and my family raved about it. One of my nephews had like 5 slices. They don’t want me to change anything, but they’re not the boss of me.
The Actual Recipe
Prep Time: Maybe 1 hour total but that’s across the 10-ish hours of resting time
Cook Time: 25 minutes
Servings: It’s a big loaf of bread. Like 12?
Calories per serving: ~300
Ingredients
Dough
All-purpose flour (5 cups/600 g)
Dry yeast (1 packet or roughly 2 1/4 tsp; 13.5 g)
Sugar (1 tsp/6 g)
SALT (5 tsp/30 g)
Extra virgin olive oil (4 tbsp/60 ml, + a drizzle for the baking dish) [*NOTE: My bread kind of stuck to the bottom so instead of a drizzle you might want to straight-up coat the bottom of the pan.]
Lukewarm water (2 1/2 cups; 591 ml)
Toppings
Mozzarella cheese
Kalamata olives
Rosemary
SALT
Directions
Whisk the yeast, sugar, and water together in a medium bowl. Let them all hang out together for about 5 minutes, until the mix is foaming with friendship.
Add the flour and salt, then mix until you get a rough, shaggy dough.
Pour the olive oil into a different bowl and then put the dough in. Mix them together. They’re also friends now.
Cover and let chill in the fridge for like . . . 8 hours. Or just overnight. They’re having a sleepover. :)
Now they’re going on an “ooting” (intentional misspell—Anya Forger is here, apparently). Take the dough combo OUT of the fridge and do your cheading using two forks, gathering up the edges of the dough farthest from you, then lifting it up and folding it over the center. Do this twice more, turning the bowl a quarter turn each time. This is actually a very sophisticated mechanic’s technique that Sera does all the time. Then let it rise at room temperature, UNCOVERED, for 3 hours.
Preheat the oven to 450°F/232°C and oil up the bottom of a 13 x 9 baking dish. Transfer the dough to the dish and then dimple it, or just run a fork across it if you want a worse outcome, whatever.
Toppings!! Add your salt, your cheese, your OLIVES, anything else that makes you happy. The toppings don’t need measurements. You just kind of sprinkle it all over.
Bake that sucker for 25 minutes. I slid a knife around the edges once I removed the bread so it wouldn’t stick to the pan when I finally tried to cut it, but that didn’t work. So maybe remove it from the pan right away and put it on a cooling rack or something.