Pp. 607 & 287: Focaccia with Caramelized Onions & Thyme & Focaccia with Rosemary

Oh, I am telling you—if you ever want to stink up your house something pretty, bake bread with herbs.

On Saturday I went to the outdoor Green City Market for the first time.  I guess it’s still not quite berry season yet (and it didn’t even feel like spring yet, what with the 50º weather, rain, and blustery cold winds), but there was quite the array of lettuces, fresh herbs, asparagus, and spring onions available.  For myself I picked up two potted herb plants (English lavender, which seemed like a lovely idea, and mint) to give my window herb garden a second try (I hear you need to water those things; I think that was my problem the first time around), a couple of tomatoes (because why wouldn’t you buy fresh tomatoes when you had the chance), a bunch of rhubarb (that’ll be another post), and a bit of fresh rosemary which I planned to use as a topping for one of my many attempts at focaccia. 

I love focaccia, but I’ve never been able to get it to rise successfully.  I’ve been using Mark Bittman’s recipe and I’ve nailed the problem down to two things.  1) All this time I’ve been buying active dry yeast in the yellow envelope when he’s been asking for instant or rapid-rise year.  I didn’t realize there was a difference so I hadn’t been proofing my yeast.  2) I hadn’t found a good place for my dough that was warm enough to allow it to rise.  I live in an apartment equipped with radiators, so I can’t always count on the temperature being consistently warm in any one particular area.  Still, I decided to give focaccia one final try from Joy.

Like Bittman’s recipe, Joy’s focaccia is no more than a variation on basic pizza dough.  The dough consists of water, yeast, flour, olive oil, and salt.  Problem #1 was fixed when I took a look at the recipe and saw that I needed to proof the yeast.  This is when I realized I been doing Bittman’s recipe incorrectly all along.  Problem #2 was fixed owing to an episode of Chuck's Day Off that I saw when I was at my parents’ house (Oh Comcast!  Why don’t you give me the Cooking Channel?!) where he suggested that if you don’t have warm place to let dough rise, turn your oven to 200ºF for five minutes, then turn it off and put the dough in.  After a ten-minute hand kneading, I oiled up my baking pans, flattened the divided dough inside, covered them both with plastic, and left them inside the slightly heated oven.

Meanwhile I went forth with caramelizing the onions.  Since the recipe makes two pans of focaccia, I decided to try two different versions, one with the fresh rosemary and the other with caramelized onions and some leftover fresh thyme stashed in my fridge.  Low and slow is the game with caramelizing onions.  What started out as a huge onion became small, buttery, intensely flavored pile of supple goodness with a little time and some low heat. 

Having finished the onions, I turned back to my dough.  After an hour and a half, this is what I pulled out:

Beautiful isn’t it?  Problems fixed.

I remembered watching an episode of Secrets of a Restaurant Chef wherein Anne Burrell instructed you to not just dimple focaccia dough, but to really put a dent in it, tear it even, to create deep crags where oil and salt can lie.  So I did that, then drizzled them with olive oil, sprinkled them with kosher salt, and topped them with their respective herbs.  Twenty-some very fragrant minutes later, out came two perfect squares of focaccia.

Well, almost perfect.  The onions started to burn in the oven, which leads me to believe that I should put them on the dough halfway through the baking time, and I put a bit too much salt on top, even for me.  Not to worry, though—these are just things to remember for next time.  And, oh, there will be a next time.