focaccia

Last night my friend Kenny and I made two different loaves of focaccia from two different recipe books. The first recipe was from Alice Waters' cookbook, The Art of Simple Food, and the second recipe was from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything. We also tried to make focaccia from The Silver Spoon, but we accidentally put twice as much yeast than we should have. Apparently dry and fresh yeast require different portions and that wasn't mentioned in the actual recipe, it was mentioned in the description which was confusing. So the dough smelled really yeasty, and didn't rise at all. We threw that batch away (I know, I hate wasting things), and baked the other two loaves in the oven.

Focaccia is just pizza dough, but instead of rolling it out in a circle, you spread it out in a rectangle pan, let it sit for 30 minutes so it can rise, and then form dimples in the dough with your fingers. However, there are a lot of different variations of pizza dough, so we tried two to start.

Making foccacia was an incredibly time-consuming project. The majority of time was spent waiting for the dough to rise on different occasions. First you would make the dough with yeast, let it sit for 2 hours, or until it doubled in size, then knead the dough, then let it sit for 30 minutes, then spread the dough out on the pan, then let it sit for 20 minutes, then bake it. We decided to top half of our focaccia with thin slices of tomato, parmesan cheese and rosemary. The other half was just cheese and rosemary.

The results were interesting. Mark Bittman's recipe came out more pizza looking, tasted more airy and salty than Waters' recipe. Waters' focaccia came out a lot more dense, I thought the flavor was more complex because rye flour was added to the recipe. Both turned out well, it's just a matter of preference as to what kind of bread you like.

Raw Ingredients



Spreading the dough out



Toppings



Before going in the oven



Bittman's focaccia



Waters' focaccia



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