Focaccia Redux

Last night I made a new loaf of focaccia using the recipe that I ruined last week.  This one turned out light and airy and delicious (not to mention beautiful)!  Now, part of the point of writing this blog is to learn as I go by keeping a record of my successes and failures and noting the tweaks I made to the recipe to achieve these results.  The problem with this loaf is that I made at least three changes in the recipe and my process from last week, so I'm not sure which one (or ones) was the ticket.

First, the recipe called for bread flour, but the last time I made it I decided to use the all purpose flour I usually bake with.  It's higher in fiber and is pretty fine, so I didn't think it would make that much difference as long as I sifted it.  This time I stuck to the recipe and used bread flour.  I also added a bit more water when I noticed the dough was stiff, unlike last time when I tried to follow the measurements rigidly.  I just followed my gut on this one and it produced much more workable dough.

Second, I kneaded the bread for even longer than last time.  I initially learned that overkneading was fatal for bread, and my understanding was that you could overknead bread pretty quickly.  This may have led to some of my bread failures in the past.  This time, I kneaded the dough for over ten minutes, and I used the windowpane test to see if dough was elastic enough.

The windowpane test involves taking a small ball of dough, flattening it, and then stretching it out until you can see light through it (so it looks like membrane).  If the dough breaks before you can see the light through it, it's not elastic enough.  I didn't grow up cooking and have never taken a cooking class, and I had never heard of this test before a few days ago!  One of the most important things I'm learning from the River Cottage Bread Handbook is the "why" of baking.  In the past, I've read cookbooks and followed recipes, but never understood why I was kneading bread, or adding one particular ingredient at a specific time, and thus I didn't understand why some of my recipes failed and others succeeded.  In other areas of cooking, I love to experiment and fiddle with recipes, but I was following bread recipes mechanically - just hoping for good results.  Now that I'm learning more about gluten and how it's developed, I can anticipate a future in which I'll know whether my bread is going to rise properly and whether the recipe will turn out the way I expected.

The third change I made was just taking a more relaxed approach to baking.  I'm often short on time and, if bread doesn't quite look like it's risen enough, I sometimes force myself on to the next step anyway.  Last night I was sharing the kitchen with my mother, who is visiting from Massachusetts.  After I kneaded the dough and left it to rise on the counter, I let my mom take over to make us dinner while I went to work in the garden and find us a bottle of wine.  I ended up letting the dough rise for longer than the recipe specified, and let it more than double in size.  It was also nearly 100 degrees in my kitchen, which probably didn't hurt.  Honestly, I'm not sure why we were baking bread and cooking a hot dinner last night!

Finally,  although the recipe instructs to cook the bread at 500 degrees for ten minutes and then 400 degrees for another ten, I cooked it for just ten minutes at about 450 or 475, and it came out perfect.  At five minutes I rotated it, although my oven heats pretty evenly.  The crust is golden and just barely crisp, and the inside is incredibly fluffy.  Last night, we sopped up the sauce from our Greek Shrimp with it, and this morning I ate a slice buttered with my fruit and coffee!