Cooking the Chronicle – Nov 1
Not every baking project can go smoothly, right? This week’s recipe was all about focaccia, but really, the baking adventure turned into being all about managing broken oven right before the bread was supposed to go in, emergency phone calls to friends who may be awake and good partners in focaccia crimes, and a 10pm race down the street to the Shugerman/Kranson household, who became the true hero of this Cooking the Chronicle story.
It all started smoothly! My daughter and I got to work right after dinner. The dough came together so nicely in the stand mixer, has only a few ingredients, was sticky, without being wet, which felt right for a dough that you needed to gently spread across a pan and poke. Our 3-year-old thought the dough was a riot, as seen in the photo above, and spent 20 min touching it, giggling, smushing it around with her hands, and trying to braid it. She’s fancies herself an expert bread baker, thanks to the weekly Shabbat challah baking that EC Zahav does at Community Day School.
After the three rises—two in the bowl, and once after the dough has been spread in the pan and topped with rosemary and olives, it was ready to bake. We had just finished dinner, where I had used the oven, but when I set out to preheat our oven again to 475 F, nothing happened. We tried again, we tinkered, we googled—but we have a gas stove, I am 34 weeks pregnant, and I was not going to mess around with potential small explosions in our kitchen. (I may be good at cooking, but I am not good at household repairs.)
My husband jumped in and started brainstorming and texting friends in the neighborhood who might be awake. “Focaccia emergency! Do you have 18 min and an oven we could use?” Here comes the real heroes of the story… Rabbi Andy Shugerman and Karen Kranson, who offered to preheat their oven while my husband shlepped raw dough over. At 18 minutes in the I got a message – “this needs more time, right?” And I agreed, it looked a little light and needed some more color. With an extra five minutes in the oven, it was looking perfect, so I tasked my husband and friends with conducting a taste test and rating the bread for our official blog post.
“This focaccia has most of what I would want from a good focaccia. It’s dense, without being heavy, it’s actually fairly light in the taste and in the mouthfeel.”
“The olives on top really accentuates the flavor.”
“The rosemary is lovely without being overwhelming. It’s clearly more on the hint side of things, and the dough came out great.”
After I knew the focaccia has made it, I immediately went upstairs to sleep, so I was only able to taste it with my discerning palate in the morning. So here are my thoughts. This was probably fantastic warm right out of the oven, I ended up toasting mine a bit to warm I up. Along with the rosemary and olives, a nice dash of flakey sea salt across the top would really be great. I wouldn’t say no to more rosemary!
The only other focaccia recipe I have made is Bon Appetite’s easy, no-knead version, which was a staple baking project in our house during the pandemic. The dough here is a little wetter, a bit more bubbly, and has longer rises. But there is something to be said for cranking out great bread in under 3 hours, rather than laboring over it for a full day, so this recipe comes out on top in terms of ease, speed, and taste.
