Name: Focaccia review by hurkanakbiyik at Ulmus Bakery, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Item: Focaccia
Rating: 3.5
Author: hurkanakbiyik

Focaccia is a flat, dimpled Italian yeast bread baked in a well-oiled tray and finished with more olive oil and coarse salt, and the version the word usually means is the fügassa of Genoa: about two centimetres high, soft and open inside, crisp and glossy underneath, with pools of oil and brine caught in the fingertip dimples. Liguria treats it as a breakfast, eaten dunked in a cappuccino, and bakeries there sell it by weight through the morning in squares cut with scissors. Other regions make different things under the same name: Recco, down the coast, bakes an unleavened, paper-thin version filled with stracchino cheese, Bari makes a thicker, softer focaccia with cherry tomatoes and olives pressed into the top, and in Florence the schiacciata is thinner, saltier and tied to the olive harvest. The name comes from the Latin for hearth, and flatbreads cooked on embers under that name go back to Roman times, but the oiled, dimpled Genoese loaf is a product of the city's bakeries rather than antiquity.

Genoese focaccia is a wet dough, around seventy percent water to flour, with a generous measure of olive oil kneaded in and a little malt or sugar for colour. It is proofed, stretched into the tray by hand without a rolling pin, left to rise again, then dimpled hard with the fingertips all the way to the base so that the holes stay open in the oven. The step that defines it is the salamoia: a brine of water, olive oil and salt poured over the dimpled surface just before baking, which sits in the hollows and keeps the top soft while the base fries in the oil of the tray. It bakes hot, around 230°C, for fifteen to twenty minutes, until golden on top and crisp beneath, and is brushed with oil again as it comes out. Toppings, where they appear, are onion, sage, olives or rosemary; the Genoese consider anything heavier a different bread.

Pick up a piece and look underneath: the base should be crisp, blistered and oily enough to shine, never pale or soft. The top should be golden with darker rims around the dimples and visible salt crystals, and the crumb between should be light, moist and stretchy, not dense or dry. It should taste of good olive oil and salt first and wheat second. Mark down a focaccia that is dry, which means too little oil or a day old, one baked without brine so the dimples have closed and the top is uniform, a thick, cakey crumb from an under-hydrated dough, an unsalted top, and a slab loaded with toppings to hide a poor base. Warm from the oven is the standard; a good one is still good at room temperature a few hours later, and a bad one is obvious cold.

Focaccia

Netherlands

Ulmus Bakery

Focaccia with potatoes on top.

Nothing special, it felt like a bread instead of a soft though. So it was hard to eat it.

On the potatoes side nothing special as well just sliced potatoes no cheese nothing on top.

Focaccia review by hurkanakbiyik at Ulmus Bakery, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Focaccia

Ulmus Bakery

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