Homemade Focaccia Bread

During the lockdown we all had a lot of time on our hands. Most of us took the opportunity to bake; I personally tried a lot of different kinds of pizza and focaccia dough, with different levels of difficulty and rising times, that can vary from two hours to three days.

Today I’ll show you how to make a simply but delicious homemade focaccia.

You only need a few ingredients and you don’t have to work a lot on it, but you have to consider the resting time so you have to start at least 6/7 hours before you want to eat.

The timetable is:

• 15 min to make the dough
• 2 hours of resting
• 1 hour and 15 minutes for folding (5 minutes of work and 20 minutes of resting, for three times)
• 1 hour of resting
• 15 minutes of work
• 30 minutes of resting
• 20/25 minutes for cooking

These doses are sufficient for a standard baking tray (25×36 cm) to obtain a high focaccia, ideal for about 8 stuffed sandwiches.

If you never made focaccia, pizza or bread before it could be a bit difficult to manage the dough the first time, so I suggest you watch the video-recipe that you can find at the end of this page.

Ingredients: 

• 600 gr of flour (for this recipe you can use all purpose flour or strong bread flour. I personally prefer to mix 300 gr of plain white flour, 200 gr of strong bread flour and 100 gr of country grain or spelt flour, to have a more rustic and stronger flavor)
• 3 grams of dry yeast,
• 450 gr of water,
• 2 spoons of extra virgin olive oil
• 12 gr of salt

Method:

Put flour and yeast in the bowl, add the water slowly and turn with a spatula, allowing the flour to absorb all the liquid. Then add the oil and the salt, and stir some more.

Cover the bowl with the cling film and put it in a warm place (you can use the oven with the light on) for about 2 hours.

After this time, you have to work a little. Put the dough on a work surface with some flour and start folding it. Make the folds three times, then leave the dough resting for 20 minutes, covering it with the bowl. Repeat for two more times.

Put the dough in a clean bowl lightly greased with oil, cover with the cling film and let it rest for another hour. You can put the bowl in the oven with le light on, or you can leave it at ambient temperature if it’s hot enough (at least 25°). Personally I don’t put the bowl in the oven, but I  like to cover it with a blanket or,  if it’s really cold, under a duvet.

Now prepare the oven tray spreading oil on the bottom. Take the dough and put it on a work surface with enough flour and start to spread it using your fingertips first and then slowly with your hands gently, being careful not to tear it and not to burst the bubbles resulting from the levitation. You can spread the dough by lifting it on your arm as if it were a waiter’s napkin. Put the dough in the baking tray ad use your fingertips to adjust it and to make a lot of regular rough dips on top. Add some oil and salt on the top (if you like you can add even fresh ground pepper and rosemary needles) and leave it to rest for at least another 30 minutes, covered with cling film or with a clean kitchen towel.

In the meantime, you can turn on the oven at 200/220 degrees. Put the tray in the oven for 15 minutes in the lower part, then move it in the middle and cook for another 10  minutes, or until your focaccia is well golden and crispy both above and below.

BUON APPETITO!

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Here you can find the video for this recipe:

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