Like all things handmade, focaccia bears the mark of its maker. What sets this flatbread apart lies somewhere in the combination of olive oil and pillowy soft dough. The soothing sensation of dimpling row after row, plunging your fingertips in until they almost touch the bottom of the pan. Then the satisfaction of filling those divots by drizzling more olive oil or brine, and scattering coarse salt. Or, before you slide the pan into the oven, rummaging around for toppings — herbs, olives, cherry tomatoes, garlic, potato, nuts, seeds, whatever your heart desires — to gently press into the grooves.
It’s a choose-your-own-adventure bread. And while sourdough has exploded in popularity during lockdown, focaccia has been experiencing its own modest rise since mid-March. With roots in Ancient Rome, there are countless variations today. No-knead, naturally leavened, thick or thin, and elaborate edible gardens that blur the line between focaccia and pizza have been filling social media feeds.
From Samin Nosrat’s Ligurian focaccia — which was featured in the Fat episode of her Netflix series Salt Fat Acid Heat — to Katie Parla’s potato-enriched focaccia Pugliese in Food of the Italian South , and Domenica Marchetti’s paper-thin, cheese-stuffed focaccia di Recco in Preserving Italy to Aimée Wimbush-Bourque’s sea salt focaccia with radish ramp butter on Simple Bites, you could easily bake your way through physical distancing and never exhaust your options.
Central to focaccia’s appeal is its ease and approachability. Unlike more involved baking projects, it doesn’t require any special equipment. “When you make hearth breads, like sourdough hearth breads, you need a Dutch oven and a blade to score it. But focaccia is something anyone can start with and it’s also relatively forgiving,” says chef Matthew Duffy , professor and program coordinator for Baking and Pastry Arts Management at Centennial College in Toronto.
Focaccia is among the first breads he teaches his students because of how well it illustrates basic baking principles. “A lot of recipes will say, ‘Wait until risen by half.’ With a focaccia you see this dramatic rise. You see these dramatic air bubbles. You see this really wet dough. It’s everything that you learn on other doughs down the road, but in a more accentuated format.”
While at home Duffy bakes almost exclusively naturally leavened breads, in class they make yeasted focaccia with a poolish, which is a mixture of yeast, water and flour that is allowed to rise overnight. Pre-fermenting a portion of the dough, he explains, adds strength, depth of flavour and shelf-life. The result is an invitingly cumulous dough. “We make the joke when it’s on the tray, ‘Oh, who wants to have a nap there?’ and all the students put their hands up. Because it’s this big, fluffy cloud of dough and olive oil. You could just crawl right in there and have a little tiny nap,” he laughs.
For author and Italian food specialist Domenica Marchetti , who has been maintaining her sourdough starter for nearly five years, focaccia — like pizza dough — is a venue for experimenting with natural leavening. She prefers her focaccia plain, but sometimes pokes in melty cheese or cherry tomato halves. If it’s tall enough to stand in for sandwich bread, she slices it in half and fills it with good cheese, mortadella or prosciutto.
Marchetti has been developing her sourdough focaccia recipe over the past four years, tweaking it each time she makes it in pursuit of flatbread perfection. “It’s sort of like trying to find the perfect potato salad, which doesn’t exist. It’s like there’s this ideal that exists in your head, and I think with focaccia it’s the same thing. Trying to get the texture of the crumb just right and that crunchy-crispy top layer, and the lightness of it and the airiness of it. There are lots of things to consider. But it’s also a fun project because even if it’s not perfect, it’s generally really good,” says Marchetti, laughing.
This flexibility is at the heart of its family-friendly nature. The dough can be mixed by hand, which is ideal for young cooks. And unlike boules and bâtards, shaping is not a requirement. For Halifax-based food writer and former chef Aimée Wimbush-Bourque , a recipe she has had since her first restaurant job in the 1990s became a way to introduce bread-baking to her children. Focaccia is foolproof, she explains, and if it doesn’t rise as it should, you can just call it a flatbread.
“We’ve probably been making focaccia for 15 years, so I love that it’s having a resurgence,” says Wimbush-Bourque. “It’s mostly pantry staples: yeast, flour, water, salt, olive oil. And it’s not as finicky as maybe a sourdough. I think it’s a great gateway bread for people who are just getting started.”
Marchetti says the advice she gives new focaccia bakers is no different from those embarking on any other cooking or baking project: “Don’t be intimidated.” Focaccia dough is very wet, which may be unsettling at first. But resist the urge to add more flour and fear not — stick with it, and like any craft, you’ll soon develop a feel for it. Duffy recommends repeating a recipe several times for this very reason. It’s in the repetition that you’ll begin to notice improvement.
The looseness of focaccia dough can present challenges for the uninitiated — it doesn’t strengthen the way a typical bread dough does. But dipping your hands in water before handling it makes it infinitely easier to work with. When students figure this out in his classes, Duffy recalls, it never fails to be a gamechanger.
“It’s such a powerful moment because it’s such a simple concept,” he says. “That’s a really simple thing that people overlook. But it’s a really good thing because you don’t want to tear your dough. You don’t want to poke holes in it. You don’t want to de-gas it. You want to be very gentle. You want to treat the dough with respect. You want to be very kind to it and be very light with the touch. You need to have an iron fist and a velvet glove.”
For kids, there may be no other baking task more rewarding than dimpling focaccia dough. This is as true for Wimbush-Bourque’s children as it is for Duffy’s two-year-old daughter/sous-chef, Juniper. During lockdown, they’ve been hosting online baking classes on IGTV — braiding challah, making pretzels and stretching pizza dough. “My daughter likes to mix doughs but I think dimpling a focaccia is probably one step above that. Because it doesn’t really stick to your hand at that point,” says Duffy. “She doesn’t love when she touches the dough and it sticks, and there’s dough on her hand. But when she touches a focaccia and it’s just the oil and the dough, she laughs about it.”
Decorated focaccias — gardenscapes, bouquets or renditions of famous artworks made with an array of herbs, vegetables, seeds, nuts and olives — are especially fun for young bakers. On Instagram, creators such as Hannah Page have upped the ante with intricately ornamented breads, including focaccia and fougasse. Colourful and inspiring, they breathe new life into a food that many associate with ‘90s bread baskets and sandwiches bars. For creative bakers of any age, they’re an invitation to play.
Wimbush-Bourque’s children — ages 14, 12 and 8 — were captivated by the idea of using bread as a canvas. To celebrate Earth Day, they used bits and pieces of vegetables and herbs they had on hand to create a floral focaccia that doubled as a zero-waste kitchen project. With two tiny purple potatoes, their last shallot and a handful of chives growing in their garden, they created edible art. “It was a blank slate, ‘Here are these colours, let’s make a garden.’ And they loved that. They had so much fun,” she says. “It was this sweet and very simple way to evoke the feeling of spring in our house.”
On the day we spoke, Wimbush-Bourque had woken up to a dusting of snow. Although spring is technically here, in many parts of the country it still feels very far away. In their beauty, decorated focaccias offer visual relief as much as they do a tasty snack. Both vibrant and recognizable, they’re as rejuvenating as the gardens they depict. “This isn’t some unattainable pastry in France. This was literally made with flour, water, yeast and some scraps,” she says. “I think what people find inspiring is making something out of nothing.”
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