The transition from one year to the next involves baking for many. In this house we try to avoid too many sweets, but there is always room for bread during the darkest season. I started making my own bread in 2020, like everyone else, and have kept at it for special occasions. Last spring I bought The Reenactor’s Cookbook at a local faire which includes an entire chapter on breadmaking, including a recipe for focaccia and lots of background information on this ancient bread.
The biggest challenge in breadmaking for me is that I absolutely cannot stand the feel of flour. It’s a sensory flaw in myself; touching flour puts me in a bad mood, which has limited my tolerance for kneading and my adventurousness when it comes to homemade bread. I usually work around the problem with nitrile gloves or oiling my workspace instead of flouring, but with my first fling with focaccia I decided to try the barrier-method. I made the bread dough in a gallon zip-lock bag. No touching required until it is already oiled smooth and half-risen!
Half of the fun with focaccia is the decorating, and that’s what I’m really trying to highlight in this post. My first design was easy because rosemary already looks a lot like a pine-tree. The Christmas tree shape is large and simple, and so translates well to bread. The ornaments are sliced peppers and tomatoes, and the “snow flake” dimples in the background are made with scallions pressed into the dough.
My second design attempt was much more ambitious. Feeling overly confident from my early success, I thought it was a great idea to try and replicate a board-game design for a board-game-day. I have a little buddy who’s favorite game is chutes and ladders, a classic, so that was an easy choice! His mom sent me the modern gameboard for reference, and I planned out my little ladders from green onions and chutes from peppers and little olive children with garlic bodies. Well, I should have probably given myself a lot more time to sculpt vegetables if I really wanted to make peppers look like chutes, but I ran out of time for perfection! You can tell what I was trying to achieve, and the bread tastes absolutely delicious, but the details are lost in risen dough and clumsy large vegetables.
This recipe is a creation of my own, adapted from multiple focaccia recipes and the help of that cookbook to put them all together.
Here’s how to make focaccia in a zip-lock bag:
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- 4 Cups bread flour
- 2 tsp salt
- 1 tsp sugar
Shake together in a 1-gallon zip-lock bag.
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- Bloom 1 package (or 2 tsp) active dry yeast in 1 cup warm water, add to bag, knead in bag (smoosh and stretch)
- Add up to another 1 cup warm water to the bag and knead until you have a sticky dough-like mess. Do not exceed 2 cups water total.
Knead for 10 minutes
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- Add 1/4 C olive oil to the bag
Knead for 5 more minutes
Refrigerate bag for at least 18 hours, not more than 3 days
- On baking day, remove dough from bag onto lightly oiled surface and form into a ball by scooping and dropping to shape
- Let rest for 2-4 hours (dough should become smooth, rise slightly, springy when dimpled)
- Punch down and knead dough for 2-5 minutes
- Oil a 9×13″ roasting pan well, don’t forget the corners and sides
- Stretch your dough to pan-size and form to pan
- Let dough double in size, about 2 hours for cool kitchens, or as little as 45 minutes for warm ones. Keep an eye on it!
- During the final rise, prepare your decorations (avoid wet decor, halve your olives, onions are your friend)
- Preheat oven to 400 F
- Press your decorations into the dough and dimple all-over. Coat with a generous topping of olive oil (do not use butter)
- Bake for 30 minutes, or 35-40 if you’ve used a lot of moist decor. Tap on the top of the bread with your nails and listen for a crusty-hollow sound to indicate it’s cooked.
- Remove from pan as soon as you can handle it with a wide flat silicon spatula and let the bread finish cooling on a wire rack up off the counter.
- If you leave the bread in the pan or on the counter to cool, the bottom will get soggy.
