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| The finished product, already somewhat devoured. Photo by Jake J. Thomas |
In order to start this project and to take it seriously as a course that I designed for myself, I realized that I needed to brush up on my baking vocabulary. It had been a while since I had baked and I was worried that I had lost what little skill I had acquired. I was also worried that the desire to bake might be extinguished by the time-consuming labor involved with nurturing dough into an edible art. I was worried, that once I committed to the project, I might lose interest, and that this blog would be another half-start to a project left undone. So I decided to do some research and bake a few odd recipes from some cookbooks I had or ones that I could easily check out from the library.
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I picked up Martha Stewart’s Baking cookbook, to really test myself. This cookbook holds the infamous “Palmier Cookie recipe” that almost scared me from ever baking again. I flipped through all the pastries; perfectly coiffed cakes with unbelievably smooth frostings and found the bread section. By this time, I was eating Nutella straight from the jar. Most of the bread recipes required special equipment and not one was written with the realization that not everyone has a Kitchen Aid mixer, a bread peel, a stone, a special bread scraper with a French name that has slipped my mind, and expensive hard-to-find ingredients that even the local exorbitantly priced health food store didn’t carry. Then I found the Focaccia recipe. The photograph in the book looked delicious, but not impossibly delicious like the perfectly-spackled frosted cakes in the previous chapter. I decided to give it a shot.
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| Photo by Jake J. Thomas |
The process seemed easy enough, put flour, yeast and water in the mixer, mix and let rise for 2 hours. Then add the salt and mix with the dough hook to resemble kneading. Turn out the dough and fold it (using that French-dough-scraper thing, or in Martha's words, to a lesser degree, your fingers)and then let it rise for another hour. Repeat the folding process, let it rise for another hour, and fill a rimmed baking sheet with olive oil. Then stretch the dough to fit the baking sheet, flip it, pour on more olive oil and coarse salt and bake. It turned out to be somewhat successful. The bread came shooting out of the oven and almost landed right on the floor, because the olive oil had drenched itself into every crevice of the kitchen including the bottom of the baking sheet. Our dog Luck was standing close by in case of an emergency like that. The only difficult part was timing my other activities for the day around the rising schedule and flipping the finished bread off of the rimmed baking sheet onto a wire rack over a baking sheet, and pouring the remaining olive oil on top of the freshly baked bread.
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Before I made the bread, I read through all of the instructions, a very important lesson I learned in a very unfortunate way on another recipe, starting with the opening statement saying that the Focaccia was best eaten the day it was baked. I thought, “What kind of maniacs could eat all that bread in one day?” Turns out I am a maniac. The bread was a hit, Jake and Caroline loved it and I felt a little bit like a superhero that had pulled off a difficult task. I felt like I had made mayonnaise from scratch, like I had whipped my egg whites to a stiff peak, like I had mastered the perfect croissant. It almost wiped the memory of those damn Palmier’s from my mind.
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| The process of tucking the dough before the second rise Photo by Jake J. Thomas |
