A Focaccia by Dinnertime
Use this focaccia for sandwiches, soups, a side, potlucks, housewarmings, late-night drunken cravings, and most importantly, if you need an impressive last-minute contribution to a holiday dinner.
Time stops people from making good bread, and I will die on this hill. My mother briefly looked into making sourdough early on in the pandemic, but like everyone else enticed by breadmaking as a hobby, she was deterred by grocery stores sold out of active dry yeast and the timely task of making a sourdough starter. I know she’s not alone. I would bet that most sourdough starters conceived in a glass mason jar during the pandemic were thrown out before they could start their first loaf of bread. No matter how much emphasis cooking YouTubers and breadmaking influencers could put on your starter only needs, like, five minutes of attention a day! the prospect of keeping a bubbling sludge of yeast on your countertop for weeks on end was unappealing to most.
I made my first focaccia in early 2022. It was for my friends’ housewarming party. Another friend [REDACTED] sent me a focaccia recipe from the restaurant [REDACTED] he worked at (I am not disclosing because I don’t know the consequences. If you know, you know). Vastly untraditional, and in a batch big enough to feed a breakfast service, I bastardized the recipe by vaguely combining it with a New York Times recipe into a sort of Frankensteined focaccia. I cut the portions. God forbid, I converted the measurements in grams to imperial measurements in volume, which I’m sorry to do, but I still don’t own a scale. One burnt batch of garlic confit and a 35-minute powerwalk down East Passyunk with the fresh focaccia in my arms to the housewarming party, it was enough of a hit. It was dense but fluffy. The burnt confit that I ended up removing from the loaf had left something of a garlic essence. I saved the recipe and continued to tinker with it. My friend Jenna once told me cooking is an art, and baking is a science, and I have always been more creative than not. Experimenting with the focaccia recipe has, and will always be an ongoing science project.
This focaccia recipe is my favorite experiment of all. It results in puffy, soft, crumbly, moist focaccia in a matter of hours; no sourdough starter is required (although you could definitely use one if you have it), and neither is rising in the fridge for two to three days. If you start it around noon, it will be ready by dinnertime. Meaning, if you woke up desperately hungover this morning after drinking with your high school friends on Blackout Wednesday, and you need to provide some contribution to Thanksgiving dinner, fear not. Carbs help with hangovers, anyway.
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