That B*tch Bakes Focaccia
Wow! Never Did I Ever Think I'd Be Into Baking. But I Am.
One day at her work, Pam told her boss, “If that bitch I’m married to doesn’t stop baking, I’m gonna blow up my A1C.”
[Pam can say stuff like this at work because: 1) her boss is our friend and was before Pam worked with her; and 2) it’s a woman-owned company in which Pam’s the only employee and thus feels ultra-empowered to describe her wife in familiar terms, like “bitch.” All is good.]
A few days later, Pam was eating her lunch, which was the second half of a gourmet burger we’d gotten the night before at AKA Kitchen. The burger was sloppy, so Pam had sectioned it up, to eat with a fork while she worked. Her boss walked by and said, “Ooo! Did that bitch you’re married to make you stuffing?” Cuz, yeah, the sectioned burger kinda looked that way.
It’s inevitable then that my featurettes on baking adopt the B-word. Welcome to "That B*tch Bakes,” in which I share with you recipes and my baking adventures.
I’ve baked since Pam and I binged all 12 seasons of The Great British Baking Show. I’ve cooked much of my life, especially spaghetti sauce, grilling, and brewing beer. But never did I ever bake. (Oh, yeah, there was that one time 20 years ago when in an Atkins-inspired fit, I tried to bake a Splenda®-riffic cheesecake. But that was it.)
In fact, I shunned baking as some mysterious realm I dared not, um, dare, lest I offend the baking fae. I was sucked in, watching British folk decimate each other with the politest critiques (“It’s a shame your cake is claggy”), whilst they baked mistakes and triumphs. I wanted to make kitchen spells, feel my hands swaddled in dough, and stir up potion-y jams and sauces, like the saucy Anglophile wench I am.
Figured it was a binge to purge from my system. Then it became its own system. Suddenly, the kitchen was ordered with hanging spoons and measuring cups. Amazon whisked in (I swear it was the Baking Fae on a toffee-drunk buying spree)—a scale, cookie sheets, new tins, cake cutters, silicon mats, and more.
“Are you kiddin’ me, or what?” I squealed. “Babe, we got ourselves a kitchen!”
That was last December. My first really big bake was Paul Hollywood’s Black Pudding and Carmelised Onion Sausage Wreath (comes trippingly off the tongue, does it not?) Except that, in Northern Colorado, I could find no black pudding. Myeh. I substituted chorizo. The thing actually came out nicely as a fine Winter-Solstice meal (or four) for us.
I haven’t looked back. I don’t vouch for being good at baking or cooking. I let the edibility of my dishes prove the pudding (unattainably black, or not). What I love about baking is the learning that comes from error. The need for substitutions when an ingredient can’t be had. Improvising when I’ve botched a key step.
It helps me live life with a little less sense of “no one here gets out alive.”
And so, in that spirit of play and magik, I give you my recipe for Focaccia, adapted ever so slightly from Paul Hollywood’s recipe (I am a disciple of all his bread teachings!):
Focaccia
(I bake by mass/weight. Use this handy site to make mass-to-volume conversions. If you can afford it and see yourself getting as b*tchy about baking as I’ve gotten, buy a low-end digital scale. So worth it.)
5 hours: 30 minutes prep (Who am I kidding? It’ll take probably an hour!), 20 minutes to bake, and the rest to prove the dough—and don’t you dare shave a minute from the proving, or you’ll regret it for the rest of your life (until you make it again, all the wiser.
Makes 8 rectangles.
EQUIPMENT:
13 x 9 in. (30cm x 20cm) shallow baking tin
Pizza Cutter (if you’re not gonna tear-and-share, like the ravenous beast you’ll transmogrify into when you smell this baking)
Cheese grater
INGREDIENTS:
The Dough
500g strong white bread flour (do NOT substitute all-purpose flour; you need the extra protein to win the quintessential focaccia texture)
8g fine salt
10g fast-action dry yeast
30ml olive oil, plus extra for greasing the tin
370ml water
The Tasty Bits
75g pitted Kalamata black olives
1 small red onion (or half of a large one), sliced horizontally into fine, two-inch shards
10 cherry tomatoes, halved
1 T dried oregano
a ye-olde-butt-tonne of olive oil, to drizzle
coarse-grain sea salt (Don’t sprinkle atomized salt from a shaker, people.)
a wedge of Romano Cheese (Please, don’t ruin this with crummy sprinkle cheese; if you can afford it, spring for a REAL WEDGE OF FRIKKIN’ IMPORTED ITALIAN CHEESE. You’ll thank this b*tch later.)
INSTRUCTIONS:
Put the dough ingredients into a large bowl (Baking-B*tch Tip: always sift your flour in every recipe) and mix with your hands to form a dough. (Go on, get in there; you know you wanna!)
Tip the dough onto a lightly oiled surface and knead for 10 minutes until soft and elastic. (You may find you need to add small handfuls of flour if the dough sticks to your hands like a mother. Don’t add too much! Just enough to get it unstuck and kneadable.) Do the windowpane test with the dough: if you can stretch it between your fingers till you see light through it, without it tearing, then you’ve properly kneaded.
Not everyone has ink, but everyone has their own way of kneading. Grease the bowl (or, better yet, a cubic container with a lid) with olive oil. Round the dough into a ball and drizzle it with olive oil. Place the dough into the bowl/container, cover with a large plastic bag (if you’re using the cubic container, seal the lid) and leave to rise at room temperature for 2 hours, until at least doubled in size.
(Here’s my b*tchy tip if you don’t have a proving drawer, but you do have an over-the-stove microwave with the stove light nestled under it. Turn on the light. Close the dough bowl/container in the microwave. The warmth of the bulb and the sealed microwave interior creates an ideal proving environment. I do this for all my yeast-based doughs.)
Don’t have no fancy provin’ drawer? Improvise, baby! Grease the baking tin with olive oil.
After it’s proven for at least 2 hours, tip the dough onto the baking tin and stretch it to fit the tray.
Drizzle with lots of olive oil (yeah, that’s a theme throughout this bake) and with your fingers, poke divots all over the dough, down to the tray itself. (Don’t worry; you’re gonna raise it again, so any poke-throughs will be sealed up in the second rise.)
Go on, poke it! Put the dough tray back into the plastic bag and prove 1.5 hours. (Do your tasty-bits slicing during the second rise. Watch your fingers.)
Preheat your oven to 410°(210°C).
Remove the tin from the plastic bag and firmly press the olives, tomato halves, and onion shards into the dough, evenly across the tray. (You don’t have to bury the tasty bits, as the baking will caramelize the exposed bits into wee parcels of heaven.)
Load that mama up! Drizzle with more olive oil and crush the dried oregano in your palms, sprinkling it, then the salt, over the dough’s surface.
Bake for 20 minutes, till golden brown.
Finish by drizzling more olive oil and section into eight slices, or for tear-and-share, drop it into the pit of beasts that your feasting family and friends will become as they smell this baking.
It refrigerates well and tastes good cold, though you can zap a piece in the microwave for 25 seconds without doing harm to the crispness and flavor.