Rose Levy Beranbaum Focaccia made 12/26/2010

The Rose Beranbaum focaccia with milk keifr used as the leavening agent was baked after room temperature fermenting for 19 hours.  Although this focaccia didn’t turn out exactly how I wanted it to, the taste of the crust was good, with a nice moistness in the crumb.  I don’t know what I didn’t manage right, but I think it might have been I did a parbake, then added oil to the top of the crust before the top was set  enough.  I have no way of knowing really what I did wrong, but this did give me a good experience in working with a really sticky high hydration dough. It could have also been the crust wasn’t set enough, when I took the focaccia out of the oven to dress it. As can be seen on the pictures the focaccia dough did rise, but must have fallen after I took this pie out of the oven after 10 minutes to add the dressings.

I had some extra onions, so this focaccia recipe was calling their names.  I have a definite weakness for onions in bread or bagels.  I caramelized the onions and added the fresh grated garlic later in the slow fry, because garlic can burn easily.  The focaccia pizza was dressed with Rosemary while in the oven, before the other dressings.  I did add different types of mozzarella cheese after the 10 minute parbake along with the caramelized onions and Panko Bread Crumbs.

My kitchen was filled with the deliciousness of Rosemary, garlic and cheesy Caramelized Onion smell.

In this discussion on chowhound, Rose Levy Beranbaum, said if you go down in the discussion-here's the story and fix i promised: the owner/baker of sullivan street bakery wouldn't give me the recipe when i asked for it saying it was very tricky and depended on the type of flour used which at the time he thought the home baker could not obtain. but a few years later i saw his recipe in someone else's book and the flour was king arthur which is generally available. it worked perfectly for me the first few times but as i travelled around the country on book tour i was aghast at how horribly it turned out even in the hands of some incredibly competent bakers! since i loved it so much and became really curious about what was going on i started retesting it on my return. to my surprise i discovered that the flour was not that significant as for one of my tests i used gold medal unbleached all purpose flour and it was still perfect. here's how i make it now: i double the yeast and the final rise in the pan takes about 2 hours. i let it DOUBLE not just 1 1/2 times. here's the most important part to get the big holes and light texture: just before baking i wet my fingertips with water and deeply dimple the dough throughout. this has worked for me consistently. i will post it on my website as soon as i get the chance to update it. the sullivan street baker was right: this is an exceptionally challenging bread--simple though it is. but i think worth it.

http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/278156

Norma