dikaryon

It’s been awhile, I know. For the last month, I’ve been working on Armenia’s Test Kitchen’s annual 3-week-long TV shoot, which pretty much blows a gaping hole in one’s regular life, what with 6 or 7 am calls, 12 hour days, weekend prep, and, most significantly, the ATKTV rice krispie treat competition (more on that later; my entry doesn’t make an appearance in that post).

And then this past week, I finally graduated with my MA degree in Biology from the Harvard Extension School. So I have rock-solid excuses for not posting here recently (not that I usually need any excuses for avoiding blogging). I do have a backlog of links and suchlike to share, and hope to get a buncha things up in the next week or so.

First up is this thingy I found today, which is a video and article from the LA Times, in which Nancy Silverton (of Pizzeria Mozza and La Brea Bakery fame) demos her Mozza’s focaccia recipe, and tells the story of how she worked out its particulars while in a bakery in Pugila. Here are the important bits:

First, I saw that the focaccia was baked in a round cake pan. Until then, I had always baked focaccia in large rectangular sheet pans. But after seeing it baked in cake pans, I realized that by working with such an unwieldy lump of dough, I had been mishandling it and thereby taking the air out of it, which makes for a dense bread. Using the smaller pans means working with dough in a more manageable size and shape — a simple thing that seems obvious in hindsight.

I also saw that the baker was cutting the dough into portions, immediately putting each in the pan in which it was going to be baked, and then leaving it there to relax for its second rise. This eliminated the step of shaping the dough in the pan, which, again, would de-gas it and make for a denser bread.

The third and maybe most significant thing I saw was that the cake pans had olive oil in them, and not just enough to coat the pan, but a layer one-eighth to one-quarter inch deep. It was a substantial enough amount that the oil would be absorbed into the bottom crust, making it crunchy and flavorful.

All very sound advice. And all of which I already used in my own foccacia recipe in Cook’s Illustrated last year. (Just sayin’.) Here’s the one bit that was news to me:

But in Italy, I noticed that the ingredients are not laid on top of the dough, which would weigh it down, making the focaccia heavy and one-dimensional. Instead, the toppings are pushed deep into the dough, so the bread bakes up around them. Not only does this make the focaccia really interesting to look at, it also results in a bread that is light-textured.

At Mozza when we press the toppings into the dough, we push ever so slightly outward, toward the edge of the pan. In so doing, we are killing three birds with one stone: embedding the topping into the dough, dimpling the dough and encouraging the dough toward the edges of the pan.

I’ve seen and made plenty of focaccia with the “toppings” buried in the dough itself, but it hadn’t occurred to me that doing so would have a positive effect on the texture of the bread itself. (Not to mention that it helps keep the toppings and bread well-integrated.)

Here’s the video:

(Via.)