Claire Saffitz Makes Soft & Crispy Focaccia | Dessert Person

You know, one thing I learned during Covet is that a lot of people have cowbells at home. I thought: where did everyone get the cowbell from? You can hear them good, ready, can I say it? Action, wait, I say action. I forgot it. Hello everyone. I'm Claire Saffits, welcome to my home kitchen today, I'm going to show you a recipe from my new cookbook. The

dessert

is a

soft

and

crispy

focaccia

and it is one of my favorites in the book. This

focaccia

is not only easy but it's also It's so awesome that you have this incredibly

crispy

, delicious bottom, like olive oil, this crunchy top with flaky salt and this super

soft

sacred interior, and I think it's going to make you feel like you were this amazing baker when maybe you're still a newbie because you really deliver with the end result, so this is my

dessert

person

from the book and you might be wondering how my editor and a lot of other people did when I told them I wanted to call to the dessert

person

in the book why do you have savory recipes in the book for My dessert person is a state of mind and it's an attitude, there are savory recipes because I really want people to know that baking is not just about desserts or sweets , it can be dinner, it can be many different things, so I have a whole chapter on savory pastries and one of my favorite recipes is this focaccia.

Basically, there is no food that focaccia is not a welcome accompaniment to, especially now that we are hitting colder weather, such as soups and stews. It is so delicious that it keeps forever. It is the perfect bread. There was one time I made the entire leaf of the tree over the course of five days and I wrapped it up like I was finally finished, I threw it in the trash and then I took it out of the trash to finish eating it because it was so good it was like it was wrapped in plastic it didn't touch any of the other garbage it's fine and I was with my mom and then we toasted it and ate it this recipe is very simple, do you do it?

I need a couple of special pieces of equipment, so I'm using a stand mixer, a scale, a thermometer, this is something optional, but very important, a half sheet pan with specific dimensions and then the ingredients are also very simple, we have flour , water, salt, yeast and olive oil. that's all because there are very few ingredients, use good quality flour and this is bread flour. It's kind of fun to cook by the book, so I might be making little changes because I'm thinking why did I do it that way, sorry. Active dry is the most common type of yeast you will find in the supermarket.

They are like little granules of yeast covered in a dehydrated coating, so most recipes that use active dry yeast will tell you to do something called proofing the yeast and that is just to ensure that the yeast is alive and will rise the bread and I'm going to dissolve the yeast in half a cup of warm water just make sure the water is not boiling you don't want it to be hot because that can kill the yeast now the reason I say use the thermometer is so you can be sure That's okay, so we're at 100 degrees Fahrenheit, that's close enough, so I'm whisking the yeast into some warm water to dissolve it.

I'm going to let it sit for about five minutes to see if your yeast is actually alive. You'll see some sort of swelling, but not a lot of really active bubbling, so I know this yeast is alive, I'm going to continue, I have room temperature water, I'm going to add two and a half more cups, that's six cups of bread flour, I continued Go ahead, I weighed it and my kosher salt and turned on the mixer. I'm going to start on low, all I want to do initially is incorporate the flour into the water, so I'm going to increase the speed a little bit now that all the flour is hydrated, that's when you can increase the speed, okay?

Mix this for about five minutes until the dough is smooth and begins to wrap around the hook. These are cheap and I like to use them instead of plastic wrap to cover things, so I just dampened it. I don't want anything to dry out in the bowl. so I'm just covering the bowl like this and I'm going to let it sit for about 10 minutes and then when I mix it again it's going to be a lot easier to develop the gluten and get to that end point so now after 10 minutes I'm going to turn it back on the mixer, everything stays in and I'm going to keep mixing on medium high heat until I start to see the dough pull away from the sides, so I'm going to let that happen.

I'm looking for the dough to be extremely soft and extremely elastic and have a little more of its own shape. This will take between 10 and 15 minutes. I mean you're at a much higher risk of underworking it than overworking it, so it's very unlikely that you're going to overwork this, it doesn't really stick to the side, so we're good to go. You can see this is so stretchy. Anything you're making with active dry yeast will almost always tell you to do it. make two increases, add a quarter cup of olive oil. I'm turning it to cover the sides.

There's a lot of olive oil in this recipe and it's like it's really what gives the focaccia its flavor, so try to use a good olive oil, definitely something extra. virgin you know first cold pressed look up all those words that kind of thing now one quick thing I want this to rise and I want to make sure the dough isn't sticking to the sides of the bowl anywhere so I just grab my scraper or my spatula or even just your hands and I'm just working around the dough to make sure it's loose and then with your hand rub a little bit of oil around the surface and then with that same towel just throw a cover on it, it'll basically double in size and it'll be It will come back super bubbly and airy, and that, depending on the temperature of your kitchen, will take about one and a half, maybe even two hours on a cold day, oh bad kitty, bad kitty, bad kitty felix. down, down, down so I made this in a glass container and you can actually see there's all this bubbling around the sides.

This is the push test. This is a test that you can use basically when you're making anything with yeast when I push. the dough comes back and that's an indication of how much gas is in it, but it leaves a very slight indentation, so now I'm going to generously grease the hashi tray just like I did with the bowl with the remaining quarter cup of olive oil earlier . I transfer the dough. I make a series of folds or stretches to the dough and this is a technique that looks very similar to sourdough or artisan bread. I'm going to go down the sides and lift it up, give it a little shake and give the bowl a 90 degree turn with your hands down and around so you can really get under the dough and lift it up and then do a couple more of those so that you are actually turning the bolts four times and turning 90 degrees. every time also look at the surface like you get everything, you can see all the gases and all the bubbles underneath, always go to the indicator and not the time, as the time is a suggestion, the time reflects how long it took me in my cooking. when I was making the recipe, but it could be very different for people at home, so always go to the indicator, which means like the double the size part, push test instead of time, so I'm going to stretch the dough as much as I can. to fill the pan, but it's going to be a little stubborn and stretchy, which is okay, so stretch it as much as you can and then when it starts to bounce back, that's when you want to let it sit so the gluten can relax and we can finish stretching it. , so I think this is all it will really do before it just shrinks.

If you see really big bubbles like that you can go ahead and pop them so this has to be covered and this time I'm going to use plastic because the dough is very sticky at this stage and anything that's on the surface is going to touch it. , so I don't want it to stick and for that purpose I'm going to oil it, so I have Like there's oil left in this bowl, the gluten needs about 10 minutes to relax, so I'm going to go back and finish rolling it out and it looks great. This photo in the book shows all the options I give you.

You can put whatever you want on top. This focaccia, the one I'm going to make is very simple, it's just garlic and rosemary, very classic, so I dedicated the book to my mom because, well, for many reasons and one of them is that I took a year off, which was the word I used. , but I actually moved in with my parents for a month and my mom helped me work on the book. I was behind on my deadlines and I really needed to focus so my mom and I liked to cook every day and we had all these ants in the house so my mom called an exterminator and the exterminator came and I was working on the cookie chapter and we had like 10 different types of cookies in the kitchen and the exterminator took one look at the ants and then he took one look at the cookies and I said well you have a problem and the type of ants you have are attracted to candy, so I basically gave my parents an infestation from everything I was baking and then we gave it to them. many cookies and took them all home.

What I love about using rosemary on top is that it's like French fries in olive oil and I love the taste of fried rosemary. A quarter cup of olive oil I let it sit like an infusion and just because I have them here and I feel like they're going to add some red pepper flakes. I'm going to carefully remove the plastic because I'm going to reuse it and I'm just going to finish stretching it in all the corners and you can see that. in a half sheet pan with one inch sides, rise about halfway, we're going to cover this again and let it rise until the focaccia is basically flush with the top of the pan, so this one cooled and then I took it.

Take it out of the refrigerator to let it finish its rye so you can see it's all the way to the top of the pan. If you have time, let it sit overnight as good things happen. Ferment slowly, develop a better flavor, and you'll have a better overall structure. Well, this step is called dimpling the dough. I love this part because it's like the inner child and he comes out and I'm like playing with clay. It's so satisfying and tactile that you might really like it. Your hands there, so I'm actually just dipping my hands into the little puddles of oil around the sides, so oil your hands and now I'm going to use my fingertips and hold my hands like a little claw or like I .

I'm playing the piano and I'm basically just pushing to the bottom of the pan and making these big dimples, so this is like strategically deflating some of the air bubbles to get this flat focaccia instead of a big one. Dome shaped, even if I didn't like eating focaccia, I would probably still make it so I could do this part and get in there, so now I'm going to use my spoon to drizzle this topping on top, so my oven is preheating to 450, let's bake this very, very hot and I have a rack on the bottom and then a rack on the top and I'm going to talk about why, but that will basically help me achieve a crispy bottom and also a very golden, beautiful, crispy top and now the last thing is a little bit of flake salt on top, this is really just to give it a little crunch and bring out the flavor of the garlic and the rosemary and all that, so this goes on the bottom. first the rack, it's hot in this kitchen with this oven at 450.

How hot do you think it is in here? Do you think it's 85 degrees here? Let's wait, I have an idea. Holy shit, it says 87 degrees Fahrenheit, so the bread is there. starting to separate from the corners of the pan and I can tell it's nicely browned and I just want it to brown more on this surface instead of the bottom so now it's going to go to the top rack and then all that heat from the top from the oven will concentrate on the surface and that will make this beautiful top layer crispy. Okay, so I think maybe another five or ten minutes and then we'll take it out, unmold it, don't look at that one.

Don't look at that one, that one's over tested, that one was just going to look there, it'll be right there, okay, look at that one, I don't have enough places to hide things in this kitchen, what's that cat doing right there? Look at his mustache. He's not handsome, hey, you can cut him off now. I think you're fine, so that's it. I know it's made because I looked but I also know because I smelled it. I'm going to loosen the focaccia with this is a really good tool. This is a fish spatula. You can use any flexible spatula.

This is just to make sure it doesn't get sticky anywhere, so I came up with that kind of system of baking on the bottom and then moving it to the top because when I was testing this recipe. At first I was just baking in the center of the oven and depending on the recipe or whatever, sometimes it just didn't brown enough on the bottom, but I just wanted it to be crispy, I like to cut focaccia. with scissors because it's so big and so it's a super easy way to get my little bite sized piece. I titled the recipe soft and crispy focaccia because you have this super crispy bottom and then this soft crispy interior on top, I think it really lives up to the name of the recipe, this recipe stays good for a long time, it's so much fun to make that you like to playwith a really fun dough and I think it's a great recipe for people who want to get more familiar with bread. working with yeast and all that and then you have this incredibly impressive and delicious product at the end and you also have a lot of it, such a great thing to share, freeze it and eat it all week, and thank you so much for watching our first video of my book person of Desserts there's so much more to come the book is full of recipes that I can't wait to show you uh so yeah I'm so excited that we're all here together come here kitty come here what do you think what do you think of the focaccia?

Hi everyone, I'm Claire, thank you so much for watching. I really love being able to communicate with everyone at home again and show them recipes from the dessert person. I want to take a moment to highlight the work of another penguin random house author and a book that I love is this one by Hawa Hassan called In Bibi's Kitchen and Hawa's book highlights the recipes, stories and tales of grandmothers from eight East African countries. throughout the Indian Ocean and is a magnificent book full of history and narrative and, of course, delicious recipes, many of them vegan and vegetarian.

I really enjoyed reading it. I like to read it like a novel, but it has some wonderful recipes that you will love and I think you will too. It will be a great introduction to East African food for many, so check it out. It's called Bibi's Kitchen. Thanks for watching. You know where to buy it. You know where to buy books. The books are easy to find.