There is focaccia bread – the dry, flavorless loaf with lots of salt and garlic, and maybe a few burned rosemary leaves, which you get in most restaurants. And there is FOCACCIA – the piece of culinary art. A masterfully executed loaf of Italian focaccia is moist and flavorful all by itself and the topping is just what it’s supposed to be – an accent.
Like many other kinds of breads, focaccia gets its flavor from the dough starter, the initial breeding facility for happy chemical reactions. And like many good things – this takes time!
Well, that’s what we used to hear. Enter George…
He’ll teach us how to make a fantastic focaccia bread in 10 hours, revealing a revolutionary “shortcut” that saves us from having to cultivate our sourdough starter over several days, like most traditional bakeries still do. And since this saves us so much time, we’ll use some of it to learn more about focaccia bread and best bread baking tips in a two-part mini course on this subject. So, the actual focaccia recipe will be taught in tomorrow’s post.
Bread lovers, home makers, baking professionals – you’re in for a real treat! Master bread baker George Eckrich reveals his personal secret to making the best focaccia recipe in the world…honest! And he will show us exactly how to do it…
Easy Recipe For The Most Flavorful Focaccia Bread In The World
by George Eckrich
As a partner in Dr. Kracker, I obsess about new flatbread formulas, and occasionally, my cracker obsession influences my occasional home baking. Such is the case with my latest focaccia bake!
Critical to baking focaccia is learning how to spell it, and whether there are two “c’s” at the beginning or the end! 
Second most important thing is that focaccia be moist rather than cakey and dense. I learned to bake great focaccia from a dedicated and totally passionate Bolognese baker, Mauricio. Since I no longer work every day in the bakery, I don’t have the luxury of multiple days to prepare preferments. The preferments are the source of flavor, aromas and texture. The challenge for the home baker is to bake great focaccia in one day or 10 hours. (I had a cracker dream the other night that gave me an idea how to take my focaccia from great to killer! But first some definitions.)
Killer Focaccia
What makes breads great? The quick and easy response is flavor and texture. But when we say flavor, do we mean their taste or their aroma? Remember that we can only taste four basic flavors: sour, sweet, salt and bitter, and a fifth, called umami, that has been recently described. Part of great bread is the manipulation of these five flavors, especially the sweet and bitter that can be found in an over-the-top crust where caramelized flavors predominate.
The nose perceives aroma, and there are unlimited combinations of aromas that the baker can play with to entice, please, entertain and addict.
The essence of transferring aroma is moisture. The first rule of great bread is add as much water as you can to the dough, and in the case of focaccia this means using recipe that is more ciabatta than standard focaccia. All bad focaccia is dry and cakey, and usually defined by a few basic flavor and herby aroma. Nothing interesting nothing complex. A waste of calories and baker effort.
Killer focaccia begins with a preferment. A preferment is a catch-all term for sponges, sourdoughs and poolishes, these are standard ways bakers create more flavor. My focaccia always starts with a poolish that I mix while I brew my tea at 6 in the morning. My dream was about a new Dr. Kracker recipe and involved the creation of a sourdough flavor. The insight was that I had in my fridge the means to create a quick sourdough that would enhance flavor and texture. Bear with me and I will describe this very easy sourdough that I combined with my poolish.
My normal poolish for focaccia is two cups of water, two cups of flour (1/4 cup of which is whole spelt flour—bacteria prosper with whole grains just like the human body— and 1 ¾ cups regular white bread flour), 1 tablespoon of sugar to nourish the yeast and 1 package of dry yeast. These ingredients ferment for 5 to 6 hours, depending on my program for the day, and this poolish creates a pleasantly sweet, yeasty aroma as well as a spongy texture – but no sour notes. My insight was to replace ¼ cup of the water with a German bread drink (Brottrunk) which is like kombucha and rich in lactobacillus bacteria.
Both the German bread drink and kombucha are probiotic drinks with live but inactive bacteria. These bacteria are inactive because there is no more simple sugars for them to metabolize; they only need a new sugar medium to begin flourishing again. The flour in the recipe provides their food source, and the bacteria immediately awaken and acidify the poolish.
Normally, a sourdough will take several days to start and will involve multiple feedings or builds. Easy enough to schedule in the bakery, but not at home. The beauty of using probiotic drinks like bread drink or kombucha is that during this 5 or 6 hour preferment they will not be able to overwhelm the yeasty flavor that is totally pleasant and very umami. At the same time, they will provide the missing sour note that tickles both the tongue and the nose. Moreover, this acidity will help improve the dough extensibility and create a more porous and intriguing structure of the crumb.
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My friends all thought that this was the best focaccia I had ever baked.
Continue reading here about the actual focaccia recipe and method…
Focaccia close-up image courtesy of Foodista. Thank you.
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