July 11th
2006
It happens quite rarely, maybe once a month, maybe twice. But last week indeed was an extraordinary week, besides the German soccer team losing the semi finals - it happened twice in A WEEK! Alright, perhaps too much drama for what I have up my sleeves entering this week; on the other hand I have nothing short of a killer recipe and one to-be (soon I hope).
What comes before finding a killer recipe? Tasting one! Which usually triggers my bulldog-like persistence to not leave without the recipe in my hands, money being no object. Killer recipes don't necessarily have to be top notch creations, quite the contrary! Sometimes it is the unspectacular, unostentatious dish, that marvels me the most.
Act ONE: Last Wednesday, still feeling a little sad about the lost semi-finals, I needed a break from work and rushed over to our beloved grab - a - quick - bite - to - eat - and - save - the - day - type - bistro - and - coffee - bar Liebherr. They offer an amazing variety of fresh sandwiches and extravagant salads, but all I could think of was cake. The young family running this place is blessed with a wonderful grandma who is in charge of most of the cake creations. Intrigued by what I saw on the counter, I daringly placed my order without even knowing what kind of cake it was, partially because buying grandma's cakes is a matter of trust... Anyway, to make a long story short, back in our office I gobbled the huge piece of creamy apricots cake down in less than a minute. Ah! So good. M. M. M. The juiciest apricots and dough, the creamiest topping - all combined in one heavenly combination! Off I was again, sending little prayers that there'd be more left... I was lucky - and so were my colleagues, with whom I shared the rest of the cake.
Returning to the bistro on Thursday put my nerves to the test, when I was waiting in line and each and every one in front of me ordered a piece of this fantastic cake. How could they possibly know? Nervously I began to count the pieces left on the tray after every new order, only to realize that there was no way I was going to be lucky today, already the last person in front of me was left empty-handed! Damn it! As I stood there obviously disappointed, pondering over what to choose instead, Antonia vanished into her kitchen, mumbling something along the lines of "We need more cake" and returned with a whole new tray of this delight. Life is good - she even promised me the recipe ...and I'll make sure to remind her :)
Act TWO: I was poking around the German Chefkoch cooking forums, when I stumbled on a Focaccia recipe. Nothing overly flashy and not exactly one that would have normally caught my attention, as we prepared Focaccia in the past - more or less successful. What did arrest my attention were the hundreds of comments on this recipe, and skimming through them, I found the majority to be very affirming and some even overwhelmingly positive. People were discussing the method in detail, sharing tips and tricks.
The best thing about it - besides its taste of course - is that it really only takes a few steps to make - or using Oliver's business tongue: this recipe has a huge ROI (return of investment)!
We made this Focaccia three times last week, both with fresh and dry yeast, including different resting times. The perfect result we achieved using fresh yeast and allowing the dough to rest for about 12 hours (over night) in the fridge. The bread came out with a wonderful crumb (with occasional large air pockets), an aromatic taste and a slightly crunchy crust.
As mentioned before, I love working with fresh yeast. When a recipe calls for dry yeast I usually substitute it with fresh yeast without batting an eye. Following a recent BBQ invitation meant a sudden increase in demand for fresh Focaccia bread, so we - in an experimental mood - used both fresh yeast for one part of the dough and in parallel dry yeast for the other, to ultimately compare the difference in volume (texture) and taste. It's quite obvious, that my favorite (the fresh yeast) creates a much more airy dough... but frankly, taste wise there wasn't much of a difference! More on yeast.
Dissolve the yeast (either dry or fresh) in the tepid water.
Add the yeast/water mix to a larger bowl together with a cup of flour and the salt, stir for about 2 minutes. Then add another cup of flour, stir again for just about 3-4 minutes. The dough should not be overworked, it's consistency will remain quite soft and sticky - it's not the type of dough you can shape much with your hands, but if you feel it's too soft add an extra 2-3 tbsp of flour.
If your timing allows, keep the dough refrigerated until the next day (it really does make a difference!) if not, then a few hours in a warm and draft free spot will do as well. However, if chilled, remove dough from fridge about 2 hours before baking. (12 hours in the fridge plus two hours in a warm spot presented the best results to us)
Preheat oven to 230°C (450°F). Carefully pour dough on an oiled baking tray or tin to not ruin its fluffiness and use your finger tips to pull the dough into the shape you'd like to give the Focaccia. Don't worry about punching holes into it, they'll be gone before the Focaccia leaves the oven - in fact, they even add to a wanted non-perfect rustic style.
Note: Dipping your finger tips briefly in olive oil will keep the dough from sticking too much to them.
Sprinkle with 1-2 tbsp of olive oil, coarse sea salt, chopped herbs and optionally olives or other toppings your heart desires. If you like your Focaccia more oily (like I do!), pour a little olive oil in the dents.
Bake for about 15-20 minutes or until lightly browned on top, you may want to turn on the grill for the last minutes to speed things up a bit. Then remove from the oven (and the tray or tin) and place on a rack to cool.
Nearly every salty topping works fine, our favorites would include coarse sea salt, chopped thyme, rosemary and olives or a blend of typical pizza spices. Some extra fine olive oil to dip it in - VA BENE!
Focaccia
Recipe source: adapted from Chefkoch-Forum (German)
Prep time: 5min., rising time: overnight (if possible); baking: 15-20 min.
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Ingredients (serves 2):
1 cup (250 ml) tepid water
20g fresh or 1 tsp dry yeast
1 tsp ground sea salt
2 cups (~275g) flour, type 550 (all purpose flour)
extra virgine olive oil
toppings: coarse sea salt, rosemary, olives...really anything you fancy
Was für tolle Bilder! Am liebsten würde ich gleich losziehen, frische Hefe besorgen und losbacken, aber da hätte bestimmt meine Chefin was dagegen. Na dann heute abend, sieht unwiderstehlich aus!
Wow, Nicky, I love Focaccia. I had my first in Porto Fino years ago and am still trying to duplicate it. Your looks and sounds great. I will be trying it, can't say when, blogs have generated soooo many recipes I really want to try. I guess I need an army to cook for.
Thanks so much for your details and conversions of C° to F°.
Oh, and can't wait for the apricote cake!!!!
va bene!
Love your visual comparison of dry and fresh yeast. People extol the virtues of their preference, but I've never really had a fresh picture in my head. Great!
Yummy! I'm making bread this weekend. I'll let you know how it turns out. Your amazing pictures make me drool all over my keyboard.
Nicky, that is some beautiful focaccia! Wow. And your time-lapse comparisons of the dry and fresh yeasts are fascinating. It's funny - here in the States, I don't see fresh yeast (or recipes calling for it) very often. I've never used it, myself. But after seeing your comparison, I might have to go out in search of some...
Thank you!
The apricot tart that you enjoyed from that little bistro sounded so good. There is an amazing open-faced tart that I love to eat when I'm in Switzerland - I wonder if it's a similar variation to the one you were talking about. Yum!
Yeast is still something I'm a little scared of - I love the comparison that you illustrated through photos of the dry vs. fresh yeast. Amazing difference in volume! Your focaccia looks fantastic!
Looks so good! I'm not a very good baker and yeast doughs scare the hell out of me. But now I'm dying to try your focaccia!
Hmmmm, yummi, looks very delicious.
Can i ask you, what kind of baking dish you use? Looks very nice and simple.
I wish you a nice and hot day ;)
bye
Belma
What a clever idea to visually compare fresh and dry yeast. The Focaccia looks perfect, I've been baking bread (mostly baguette) several times, but wasn't to satisfied with the results. This Focaccia has to be next!
Die Zubereitung klingt so einfach, kaum zu glauben, das dabei so ein toll aussehendes, leckeres (diesbezüglich glaube ich euch einfach mal ;) Brot herauskommt. Bisher habe ich immer Trockenhefe verwendet und mich gewundert, warum mein Teig nie so richtig aufgeht mochte. Mag natürlich auch an meiner Ungeduld liegen, länger als eine Stunde Zeit habe ich dem Teig noch nie gegeben.
Thank you so much for your killer recipe! What a gift, I'll try it in the next few days. I myself am still hung over from losing the final (I'm part French), and have taken refuge in baking for comfort. But this weather is not ideal for rich cakes and your focaccia looks like the perfect antidote.
(Interesting that we both lost to the Italians yet have no qualms about making an Italian dish!)
Brilliant demonstration of the difference between the yeasts.
I love baking bread. And foccacia is a really fun one to make. I've never used fresh yeast, but now I really want to. And I'm really excited for the apricot cake!
gotta love an experiment with yeast involved...very convincing
Just discovered your blog and have to say it is adorable! Your recipes look so delicious, you have to write a book!
I have just made this recipe. Delicious, and it reminded me of my frequent stays in Liguria. And it was easier than I ever would have imagined. I will be posting photos on my blog in the next few days.
FYI, I followed your instructions in grams but I believe there is a slight mistake: in my mind a cup of flour is 125g, so 300g would be more like 2 1/2 cups. The dough almost formed a ball and was a bit hard to stir. However, the result was delicious, which proves it's a forgiving recipe! Also, I used dry yeast very successfully (but I love the visual comparison you give of fresh and dry, I will try fresh whenever I find some).
I can't thank you enough for sharing a recipe that will make me appear a cooking hero at so low a cost (ingredients or time).
EDIT : Concerning the cup measure: I used a standard US cup size and weighted the two cups of flour afterwards (=300g), just to be on the safe side. I double checked with online conversion tables which seemed to all have different specifications (also dependent on the type of flour). Thanks for double checking and feel free to decrease the amount of flour next time.
Just wondering, where can you buy fresh yeast as opposed to the dry packaged ones?
I tried the recipe yesterday and it knocked my husband off his feet! He couldn't believe, that I can bake tasty bread. Thank you so much for the recipe!
I really love using fresh yeast myself, but I find that the products baked with the fresh yeast have a more subtle taste than those using the dry yeast. It seems that the dry stuff gives a more harsh yeasty taste, to me anyway. I can hardly wait to do some bread baking this fall. It's just too warm for me to appreciate it now.
I LOVE the photo comparison that you did between the fresh and dried yeast! I'm a fan of fresh and have not used dried yeast for years. If I don't have a 'cake' of fresh in the fridge, I don't bake!
I'm also a big fan of the overnight ferment, you get SO much more flavor!
Sorry 'bout the match!
Melissa
Hi Tanna, That's indeed a problem! My recipe box is literally bursting with all the new recipes, a large amount coming from other foodblogs...
Concerning the apricots cake: I already received the recipe and made the second batch. There's still a little tweaking necessary, but I'm going to post about it soon!
Paige, The same with me! I had various prejudices about the two different types, so it was a good opportunity to finally straighten things out.
Karthik, Great, let me know how it turned out. Btw, we also made a double batch this weekend for our house party. In hindsight I should have quadrupled the amounts, the pieces were gone in no time ;)
Molly, Yes, that's what friends keep telling us! Here in Germany you can get fresh yeast in every supermarket, or directly at a bakery, where they sell the real deal, "baker's yeast". It is said to be even better in quality. If you have the chance to try it, go for it, I think crumbling fresh yeast with your fingers is one of the most sensual cooking experience (seeing-feeling-smelling)!
Belma, That is actually a present I got last year and I totally love it. It's easy to clean, still looks shiny new and so far, every cake/bread I used it for worked out fine. OK, maybe it is all due to the used recipes, still - I like it very much! It was bought at Williams-Sonoma, USA.
Melanie, das ging mir immer ähnlich. Den Teig über Nacht im Kühlschrank gehen zu lassen ist aber nicht nur praktisch, sondern hat auch noch positive Auswirkungen auf Geschmack und Konsistenz. Unbedingt mal ausprobieren!
Astrid, Hope your mood picked up in the meantime? It's too funny, how we all got impacted by the soccer games ;)
And please feel free to adapt the amount of flour to your own liking. Looking forward to your post! We just made a double batch over the weekend... I can't stop preparing this Focaccia!
Jenjen, In Germany you can buy little cubes of fresh yeast in every supermarket, look out for the chilled cabinets (typically near by the butter), or you go directly to a bakery, where you should be able to buy "baker's yeast", which is said to be even better in quality.
Emilia, That's wonderful! The only problem might be: Now he tasted and fell in love with your homemade bread, will he still like to eat store-bought ones again ...?
Mochene, You're soooo right about the temperatures! But with all the BBQ parties around, we had good use for the bread.
Melissa, I've read about the overnight fermentation several times in the past, yet I never tried it myself until I came across this recipe. And now I'm hooked! Like you, I always try to have some fresh yeast in the fridge... who knows what I might need it for?
Hi! First time here on your site. Fabulous pictures! Especially the series of dry yeast vs. fresh yeast. Delicious!
Hi Nicky and Oliver, I've already tried two of your delicious recipes and now I can't wait to do some bread baking. The Focaccia looks oh-so-perfect!
Sieht köstlich aus, wie immer bei euch! Ich kann euch auch dieses Foccacia-Rezept (http://kochtopf.twoday.net/stories/2275727/), welches mit einer Biga gemacht wird empfehlen.
Hi Nicky, I've posted my focaccia here. Let me know if you object to my copying your recipe directly in my post. Thanks again!
hi! there! this site is very usefull for those who really like in baking! LIFE IS GREAT!!!! MORE POWER TO U GUYS!
Your yeast demos are fascinating. Like you, I make bread frequently. Unlike you, I tend to use active dry yeast (as opposed to instant dry) rather than fresh. Fresh yeast won't keep all that long and any sources of fresh yeast that I've found are SO much more expensive than the largish jars of active dry yeast that I keep in the refrigerator.
It has been poisonously hot here recently and we have been baking focaccia on the barbecue. One night, we decided to shape the focaccia dough into buns (which came out sort of like really fluffy pita)
Our focaccia dough is quite similar to yours except that I always add a little whole wheat flour. It gives the bread a nice nutty flavour.
-Elizabeth
P.S. account of buns on bbq at http://etherwork.net/blog/?p=262
la foccacia il n'y pas à dire c'est tout simplement délicieux, avec des oignons confits c'est également un vrai délice
[...] click on image for larger view I don’t know if the way we deal with yeast gives the dough a jump start or not. Many people now-a-days recommend adding instant dry yeast directly to the dry ingredients. I like to rehydrate active dry yeast first and make sure it’s starting to foam before I add it to the rest of the dough. (Read about Nicky’s (delicious: days) preference for fresh yeast.) [...]
It's very true on what they said in 'Chicago Tribune' recently that you 'can make a tiny cube of yeast look like a delectable piece of art' in case you haven't seen the article click here.
Your focacia bread looks so tempting and great photos as usual!
Is fresh yeast more or less affected in sweeter dough recipes that contain sugar? Very nice comparison!
I've made this focaccia recipe three times in the last week, and they all turned out very well. Thanks for sharing the recipe!
Can you freeze the dough before baking? I'd like to be able to make the dough one day and bake it fresh on another day? Is this possible?
KB, Although generally one could freeze yeast dough, in this specific case, I'm not sure if the result will be satisfying. The whole rising procedure makes this smooth dough extremely fluffy with many air pockets, freezing after rising might destroy this structure. And freezing before the dough rises won't save you any time.
We've had the Focaccia at least twice a week over the last month and by now I feel I can do it blindfolded. Preparation takes takes me 5 minutes in the morning, just before leaving the house for work. I remove the dough from the fridge as soon as I get back home, and bake it an hour or two later. It's a really low maintenance dough.
Your Focaccia photos were haunting me in my dreams. Yesterday I surrendered and tried it myself, the result was everything I had hoped for! Thank you, thank you!!
Hi Miguela, I'm so glad you gave it a try and even more so because of the focaccia turning out great!
Hi Nicky, I finally got around to trying this recipe out and was so very surprised at how little I had to...it actually had me concerned. I kept thinking I was missing something. No kneading? Great! Anyway, having said that my foccacia was a bit doughy. I thought maybe I had underbaked it, but no, it's definitely doughy. I'm not much of a bread baker at all, so I'm not sure if I'm confusing the term doughy for yeasty. It still tastes okay though!
[...] Diese Focaccia wurde im Sommer unter dem Titel “Arrested and kept forever” bei Deliciousdays gepostet. Nicky war das Rezept bei Chefkoch.de wegen unendlich langen Liste von begeisterten Kommentaren aufgefallen. Dort war der Titel “Null Aufwand, tolles Ergebnis“. [...]
I just found your blog a few hours ago. I was on the net in search of a great focaccia bread when I stumbled upon the one you posted. I just finished making it and I am truly amazed. I can make this! I made it! It's just as good or even better than the store bought ones. Thank you so much for the recipe. It's going in my kitchen safe.
I'm not a great photographer like you, but here are a few pictures of mine.
I infused the oil with thinly sliced fresh garlic, rosemary and salt.
I also added carmelized red onions with brown sugar and balsamic vinegrette.
my husband of course was the ginea pig. I came into my office to write a review and he helped himself to a second slice all on his own!
thank you!!
Thanks for a great recipe!
This was the first focaccia recipe I tried out... and I think I don't ever need to search for another one.
Just perfect! :)
PS. I also prefer fresh yeast and your illustration proved my point. Fresh is best... no doubt about that!
[...] Focaccia from Delicious Days [...]
Ummmmm ..... so where is that yummy apricot cake recipe ... ? ..... :) :) :)
I just found out that Santa might be bringing me a stand mixer this year. I printed this one, just in case.
[...] Delicious Days has a lovely post on live vs dried yeast and a German take on focaccia. [...]
Yum! Baking your own bread, how cool is that! I'm already glad if my muffins turn out "eatable". We're having a BBQ next Saturday, maybe I should ask my sister who is more talented to bake it for me ;)