Springtime baking notes: bread to share, celebrating diverse flours and how to get (even) more flavour into your loaves

21 Mar

Focaccia with olives, rosemary and sea salt

This super-hydrated dough is light, airy and full of bubbles. A perfect accompaniment to a family meal or slice horizontally across the middle and fill the bottom layer with antipasti, sliced Italian cheese and cured meats before topping with the remaining layer and creating the most delicious sandwich to share!

Use a rimmed baking tray. The depth and width will dictate the height of the finished dough.

Prep 5 minutes to mix the preferment, 45 minutes active time. Prove for 3-4 hours. Bake 30 minutes.

Preferment (the night before)

Strong white bread flour

Rye or wholemeal flour

Active dry yeast

Fine sea salt

Cold water

Final dough (bake day)

Strong white bread flour

Fine sea salt

Water @ 35°c

Active dry yeast

Tasty olive oil

Flaky sea salt

Pitted black olives

Fresh rosemary tips

The night before, mix the ingredients together for your preferment using a wooden spoon or spatula until all the dry flour is incorporated and you have a rough dough. This should take no more than 5 minutes. Cover the bowl and leave ambient overnight. The next morning this will be a bubbly and flavourful addition to your dough.

The next day weigh the water, holding back 30g, then mix with the dry yeast. Combine the preferment with the yeasted water in a mixing bowl then add the flour and salt and use a dough scraper or your hand to combine the ingredients together to form a shaggy dough, making sure no dry ingredients remain. Trickle half the olive oil down the sides of the bowl. Leave the dough to rest for in a warm place for 30 minutes, covered. The dough should be approximately 25°c.

After 30 minutes sprinkle half of the remaining water (15g) over the dough then stretch and fold the dough from top to bottom and left to right ( 4 stretches) until it feels tight and strong. Repeat this again after another 30 minutes, incorporating the remaining 15g of water. Rest the dough for 1 hour in a warm place. While the dough is resting prepare your baking tray with well olive oiled baking parchment.

After one hour, tip the dough out of the bowl onto the oiled baking tray. The size of your tray will dictate the thickness of your finished focaccia. Gently dimple your oiled fingers into the dough to encourage the dough to fill the tray. If it won’t go into the corners yet let it relax for 10 minutes and then use your fingertips to gently stretch the dough.

With oiled fingertips gently push rosemary tips, black olives and flaky sea salt into the dough. Leave the dough to prove for another 1-2 hours until the dough is bubbly and risen.

Preheat the oven to 240°c/220°c fan, placing a heavy baking tray to preheat on the shelf you will bake your focaccia and a small deep roasting tray at the bottom of the oven to create steam.

When you're ready to bake place your focaccia tray on the preheated tray and throw some water onto the small roasting tin to create steam (take care – steam can burn!). Bake for 15 minutes with steam then vent the oven to remove the steam and bake for another 15 minutes until the focaccia is golden brown. Remove from the tray to cool after 10 minutes.

A good read:

The flavour and texture of wholegrains is celebrated in Dawn Woodwards book ‘Flour is Flavour’, a book I can’t recommend highly enough if you're interested in the unique taste of heritage grains such as rye, spelt, buckwheat and barley. Dawn’s recipes are the perfect antidote to commodity white flour, redefining flour as a flavourful ingredient and encouraging bakers to seek out local grains . Published in Canada by Good Egg, Dawn Woodward is a proponent of wholegrain baking. The recipes are primarily for sweet treats ( a personal favourite for students attending my classes is the ‘rye chocolate cookies with fleur de sel’) and are perfect if you're wanting to eat a diverse range of grains.

Baking know-how

Baking bread takes time, so if you're going to make the effort then making more than one type of loaf at a time is a real win. Adding ingredients to a basic dough to create something much more interesting is a great way to use up leftover fruits, nuts and even cheese! An ‘Inclusion’ is simply the name for any ingredient added to the bread dough before your final prove and bake. Generally, inclusions are finely chopped, dried or fresh ingredients that are incorporated into the dough once the first kneading is complete (it gets messy if you do it before then!) These ingredients can take the form of fresh fruit, cheese, spreads or sauces adding flavour, boosting fibre (flakes such as oats and barley), texture (chopped nuts and seeds) and colour too (a swirl of green wild garlic pesto makes beautiful patterns when the loaf is sliced). My favourite inclusions to wholemeal loaves are pumpkin seeds and linseeds which not only taste delicious but are excellent sources of heart-healthy omega 3’s, magnesium, zinc and iron. If you like to put your bread in the toaster make sure to pick something that will stand up to the heat - sugary inclusions such as chocolate chunks are delicious but best placed flat under the grill!