Overnight focaccia, or how to use the waiting
Most of baking is waiting, and most of astronomy is waiting, and the two kinds of waiting fit inside each other almost perfectly. Mix a focaccia at eight in the evening, go outside until one, come back, fold it once, sleep, bake at nine. The dough does not care what you were doing.
Overnight focaccia, one tray
- 500 g strong white flour
- 420 g water (84%, it will feel wrong, keep going)
- 10 g salt
- 3 g instant yeast, or 100 g active starter and 2 g yeast
- Olive oil, generously, twice
Stir everything with a spoon until there is no dry flour. Not kneading: stirring. Cover the bowl. Over the next hour, reach in with a wet hand and fold the dough over itself four times, resting ten minutes between folds. That is the twenty minutes of work.
Then leave it. In a cool kitchen, twelve hours is fine. In July, use the fridge or you will come home to a dough that has climbed out of the bowl and is considering its options.
In the morning, pour a serious amount of oil into a tray, tip the dough in, and dimple it with your fingers until it reaches the corners. If it springs back, wait fifteen minutes and try again. Half an hour to puff, then 230 °C for about 22 minutes.
Salt flakes and rosemary are traditional. I have been putting halved cherry tomatoes in the dimples, which is less traditional and better. A tray of this, cut into squares and wrapped in a tea towel, is the correct food to take out to a dark field. It survives being sat on.