I’ve tried a few focaccia recipes before, but to be honest, it had never reached the level of my go-to brownies, carrot cake, cookies, or pancakes.
The bread, which I bake most Sundays, benefited from the addition of chicken fat and extra water; I’d gotten by okay with Paul Hollywood’s recipe.
But to be honest, I’d started to feel like the effort-to-reward ratio wasn’t in my favour. I was getting pretty tired of kneading bread for endless minutes and dirtying my just-cleaned kitchen for a 2pm lunch; it’s not like I’d gotten the texture as springy and filled with air pockets as I preferred, anyway.
So, in a last-ditch effort to preserve the household tradition, I thought I’d try a no-knead, overnight recipe from Alexandra’s Kitchen.
I was sceptical and of the routine when I started it, but now? People, I’m never going back.
How does it work?
The recipe I used advised I simply add water and oil to salt, bread flour, and yeast.
You don’t have to knead, or so much as touch, the dough; all you have to do is whisk the dry ingredients together and then mix the water in until fully incorporated (I did this using a silicone spatula).
Then, you leave the lot in the fridge for a minimum of 12 hours (I left mine for 18). It’s crucial to slick the dough with lots of olive oil and cover it with as tight a lid as possible so it doesn’t dry out.
I’ll be honest; I didn’t trust that the dough would rise, especially considering how limp my wrist-breakingly kneaded work had been in the past.
Well, here’s how puffy and active it proved after an overnight rest:
That was the bubbliest rise I’d seen in any focaccia attempt (turns out a long, slow, cold overnight rise, which can last for as long as three days for this recipe, strengthens the gluten in the dough, providing those bigger air pockets I was after).
And the process helps to release simple sugars from the flour too, ensuring better flavour and deeper browning (my previous attempts looked anaemic).
This was just the first rise. The second step was to place the dough in an oiled container and wait until it had doubled in size ― for me, this took about two hours.
Once it had filled the tray (again, I was surprised at its even, stretchy rise), I added rosemary leaves, put more oil on the surface, dug my fingers into the dough to create those signature dimples, and added salt.
After that, it just needed a 25-minute bake.
And?
That feels like cheating, because I’m used to wasting the best half of my Sunday on worse results.
But hey ― if the science of cold fermentation works better than my actual graft, I’m happy to concede my old routine to the stir-and-sit magic.