New Recipe! A Glover Gardens Twist on Focaccia

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Sometimes a simple restaurant bread steals the whole show. That’s exactly what happened when we had lunch recently at Che Gaucho, an Argentinian restaurant in Tomball. They had us at hello, before the entrées even arrived, because the complimentary bread and chimichurri were scrumptious. Especially the bread. It was soft inside, with a tender crumb that reminded me of Sally Lunn bread, and just enough crust and herbs to make every bite irresistible. Naturally, I had to go home and recreate it.

Was it Pan de Campo?

I did some Googling and initially thought the bread might be Pan de Campo — a rustic bread of the Argentinian countryside — but a little more research set me straight. Down here in Southeast Texas, Pan de Campo has its own story: it’s our official state bread and a cowboy classic, made without yeast and cooked in cast iron over coals.

Check out this post from the blog Way Out West with the Cowboy Accountant for more info about Pan de Campo. As a native Texan, how did I get this far in life (today old!) without knowing about the Texas State Bread, and without having ever tasted or made it? Texas, we’ve got ourselves a marketing problem. But that’s for another day.

Actually, It Was Focaccia

Next, I did what I should have done in the first place: I called the restaurant to ask about the bread. They said it was their version of focaccia — though I found it a little softer than the typical Italian loaf. I’ve made focaccia before using several different recipes and have never been very happy with it. But I really wanted to capture the magic of the bread we’d had at the restaurant, so – game on! I set out to create a Glover Gardens spin on focaccia, topped with our Zippy Sicilian spice mix for a spicy, herby kick.

So I revved up the test kitchen, did a lot more research, and landed on something simple, delicious and repeatable. And I DO mean repeatable: I made my new recipe three times before deciding it was shareable, because I want you to be successful with it, too.

If you are using our Zippy Sicilian to top the focaccia (highly recommended), take a few minutes to whip up a batch while the dough is doing its first rise. You’ll find the recipe here: Zippy Sicilian spice mix.

Recipe: Focaccia, the Glover Gardens Way

Serves 8-10; active time: 40 minutes; total time: ~3½ hours (mostly rising time)

Ingredients

• 1¾ cups warm water (about 110°F)
• 2¼ teaspoons (1 packet) active dry yeast
• 1 teaspoon honey
• ~5 tablespoons good-quality extra-virgin olive oil, divided
• 4 cups all-purpose flour or bread flour, plus a little more to spread on the kneading board
• 1½ teaspoons salt
• 1 tablespoon Zippy Sicilian spice mix, or your favorite Italian spice mix
• Optional: additional olive oil for finishing

Cooking Instructions

1. Proof the yeast: In a small bowl or measuring cup, combine the 1 ¾ cups warm water, yeast (2 ¼ teaspoons), and 1 teaspoon honey. Stir gently and let stand 3–5 minutes, until foamy. Add 2 tablespoons olive oil.
2. Make the dough: In a large bowl, combine 4 cups flour and 1½ teaspoons salt and whisk together. Add the wet ingredient / yeast mixture and stir until a soft, slightly sticky dough forms.
3. Knead: Turn out onto a lightly floured surface and knead for about 6 minutes, keeping the dough as moist as possible (only adding flour to the surface or your hands if the dough sticks so much that you can’t work with it). (Or knead in a stand mixer with a dough hook on medium-low for about 4 minutes.)
4. First rise: Spray a medium large bowl with cooking spray or rub it with a bit more olive oil, then place the dough in it, turning it over so that all sides have touched the oiled surface. Cover the bowl loosely and let it rise in a warm place for at least 90 minutes, until doubled in size. 
5. Shape and second rise: Spread 1 tablespoon olive oil across the bottom and sides of 12″ cast iron skillet. Put a little oil on your hands, punch down the dough in the bowl with your fist, then spend about two minutes pulling and folding it, still in the bowl. Shape it into a disk about 1 inch thick, and gently place it into the oiled skillet. It may not touch all sides at this point, but will expand as it rises. Cover lightly with a towel and let rise another 45–60 minutes. Preheat the oven to 450℉ during the last part of the second rise.
6. Prepare for baking: Brush the risen dough with 2 tablespoons olive oil, then use your fingers to put dimples across the surface of the dough, pushing down lightly until you feel the pan. There should be a dimple about every 1½ to 2 inches. Sprinkle generously with Zippy Sicilian or your other favorite Italian spice mix.
7. Bake: Put the bread in the 450℉ oven, set the timer for 5 minutes and then reduce heat to 400℉. Bake for about 17 to 22 more minutes, until golden brown and lightly crusted on top. The loaf should sound hollow when tapped. If your loaf is done but the top isn’t browned to your liking, you can broil for 1 minute for a darker crust.
8. Optional: Brush with more olive oil while hot after removing from the oven.
9. Serve: Cool 5-10 minutes before removing from the skillet and slicing. Serve warm.

Note: all steps are highlighted below in the Join Me in the Test Kitchen(s) section.

Join Me in the Test Kitchen(s)

This focaccia is delicious. I made it three times in two weeks — twice at Glover Gardens and once at Gumbo Cove, our little bay camp in Mississippi. I played with several variables along the way:

• using honey to “feed” the yeast instead of sugar
• adding Zippy Sicilian to the dough
• kneading time, technique, and flour quantity
• pan size and loaf depth
• rise times
• when to add olive oil (before or after dimpling)
• topping with rosemary and flaky salt vs. Zippy Sicilian

The recipe is solid now, and I’m so happy to share it with you. This is not just a repeatable recipe — it’s a re-heatable output. The focaccia is sturdy and lasts up to a week in the refrigerator.

Let’s walk through the steps, with pictures.

Proof the Yeast

You know the yeast is live when the mixture starts to bubble and grow. If it doesn’t foam, start over with fresh yeast. In my second batch (middle picture), I proofed the yeast in the measuring cup, and it almost foamed over! I won’t be doing that again.

The olive oil and honey gets stirred into the yeast mixture before being added to the flour and salt.

Make the Dough

This step is as simple as adding the wet mixture to the dry mixture and stirring to reach a soft dough.

In the second batch, I added about a tablespoon of Zippy Sicilian to the dry mixture, but I didn’t find that it materially added to the flavor.

Knead

I kneaded the bread by hand for two of the loaves, and used the mixer for one of them. It’s messier but far more fun and rewarding to knead by hand, and focaccia doesn’t really require that much muscle. So I recommend rolling your sleeves up and getting your hands dirty for this one. Also, don’t use as much flour as I did on that first version (top left pic); it only needs enough not to stick. A bread scraper like the one I’m showing in the second pic below is a handy tool for kneading homemade bread.

The mixer puts out a smoother dough ball, but that doesn’t matter in the least to the finished product.

First Rise

The dough ball goes into an oiled bowl and gets turned so that all sides are oiled.

Then you cover it loosely and put it in a warm place to rise until doubled in size.

Shape and Second Rise

The first loaf I made: results of the first rise, after punching it down, and then positioned in the 12″ cast iron skillet.

The second focaccia test was the one where I experimented with using a cookie sheet to make a longer, flatter loaf. That wasn’t our favorite, although the taste was spot on.

For the third loaf, with urging from The Grill-Meister and in complete agreement with him about its superior result, I went back to the 12″ cast iron skillet.

In the shaping step for the second rise, you first “punch down” the risen dough. This is my favorite part of making bread. It’s so satisfying to punch your oiled fist into the warm, risen dough and hear the hiss of the air bubbles bursting. I experimented with the kneading approach for this step and landed on the fact that it doesn’t need much, thus the instructions to “fold and pull” after you have punched down the dough, and then stretch it roughly into the shape of your baking dish to nestle it into the oiled pan. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t fill the whole pan; it will expand to meet the edges as the second rise takes hold.

Prepare for Baking

After the second rise comes another fun part: preparing the delicious loaf for the oven. The dough is “dimpled”, brushed with olive oil, and seasoned. You use your fingers to put dimples across the surface of the dough, described by some as “like playing the piano”. That’s my first loaf.

The second loaf on the baking sheet was dimpled, then brushed with oil, and then topped with lemon-flavored sea salt and dried rosemary.

The third loaf, back in a cast iron skillet, was at Gumbo Cove, and there I learned that is it easier to brush the olive oil onto the dough before doing the dimpling. It spreads more easily and you don’t feel like you’re beating up the dough or pulling it unnecessarily when you push the brush across it. I went back to topping with Zippy Sicilian, which is much more flavorful than just the rosemary and salt.

Bake

I did a lot of research about focaccia and learned that an evenly hot oven is really important to get a nice crust. That’s why my instructions tell you to start the oven at 450℉ and reduce the heat after 5 minutes.

I got excited watching the first batch cook and took a pic while it was still in the oven. It was rising so beautifully!

Here are the three finished loaves. The first one gave me the satisfaction of knowing that I could, indeed, make focaccia, and that my recipe was pretty darn good.

The second one, stretched out onto the baking sheet, looks more like you expect focaccia to look, but we strongly preferred the depth and softer crumb of the cast iron skillet versions.

And that’s why this is “focaccia, the Glover Gardens” way, in a cast iron skillet, and with a bit of height to it.

Why Create My Own Focaccia Recipe?

I mentioned above that I’ve made focaccia before and the results never wowed me. It could have been user error, or perhaps the instructions assumed some tacit knowledge that I didn’t have. But I love this rustic bread and really wanted to master it, especially after our experience at Che Gaucho. I wanted a focaccia of my own, one that would make family and friends rave. I did tons of online research, looking at quite a few recipes, and narrowed in on several key things:

• The moister the dough, the softer the crumb
• The oven needs to be very hot to get the crust you want
• There are only a few essential ingredients: salt, flour, water, yeast and oil
• You can make focaccia without kneading, but that requires a much longer rising time; there are many popular recipes which use an overnight rise in the refrigerator (but that’s not for me!)

Given these parameters, I zeroed in on amounts that seemed right to me, and set about to make a simple kneaded focaccia. While a no-knead overnight refrigerator rise sounds good in theory, our lives here at Glover Gardens are fairly spontaneous and I’m not likely to make something that requires me to get started the day before, unless it’s a holiday. I was lucky to hit the jackpot on my recipe ratios the first time out, but I didn’t think of using honey to feed the yeast until the second batch. Honey is also nice because it adds a touch more moisture than granulated sugar, makes the crumb a little softer, and can help with browning.

I’ve been working on this post off and on for several weeks, taking a bit longer than usual because of business travel, Thanksgiving holidays and the wonderful rush of family visiting, and as I was finalizing it on Sunday, I realized that I didn’t have enough pictures of the finished product, sliced. We keep eating it too fast! So I told The Grill-Meister, I’m sorry, Zippy Sicilian Focaccia will be on our table again for the next few days (4th batch since November 8th!), and he was delighted. It was on the first rise as I was writing, and I vowed to have enough self control to get pics of the finished product, sliced, before we dove into it. Here goes:

Serving Suggestions

It almost seems silly to have serving suggestions for something as ubiquitous as focaccia: it’s one of the best breads EVER for dipping into seasoned olive oil. But here are a few ideas anyway, because focaccia is wonderfully versatile — it can play supporting actor or star, depending on how you serve it.

Simple & Classic; perfect when the focaccia is warm and fresh and paired with:

• Olive oil and flaky salt (optionally warmed, with a little Zippy Sicilian stirred in)
• Butter (salted, softened — surprisingly great with herbed crust)
• Honey drizzle, or even a hot honey drizzle

Appetizer / Bread Basket; great for entertaining or dinner parties, cut into ‘fingers’ and served with:

• Whipped ricotta and lemon zest
• Olive tapenade or marinated olives
• Chimichurri or our Chimichurri and Greek Yogurt Throw-Down Dip
• Roasted garlic spread
• Our Tuscany-Texas Goat Cheese Spread
• Use as a base for crostini: sliced, lightly toasted, topped with:
  • Burrata and olive oil with herbs
  • Tomato confit or Bruschetta toppings
  • Prosciutto and fig jam
  • Glover Gardens Nutty Pesto

Meal Companion; focaccia is excellent alongside hearty dishes:

• Grilled or roasted meats (steak, chicken, lamb, sausage)
• Soups & stews (especially tomato soup, minestrone, lentil soup)
• Pasta, pasta and more pasta, like our Wild Mushroom Lasagna, or Fettuccini Puttanesca With Shrimp And Creamy Vodka Marinara
• Salads (Caesar, arugula with lemon vinaigrette, chopped antipasti salad), or our Cobb Salads

Sandwich & Flatbreads:

• Open-faced sandwiches/flatbreads:
  • Grilled vegetables and goat cheese or fresh mozzarella
  • Roast beef, arugula and our Creamy Horseradish Spread
  • Smoked salmon, crème fraîche or goat cheese and dill
• Paninis
  • Mozzarella, tomato, and Glover Gardens Nutty Pesto
  • Chicken cutlet, greens and aioli or chimichurri
  • Split horizontally like ciabatta for lunch sandwiches

Breakfast & Brunch:

• Toasted focaccia with scrambled eggs and avocado
• Egg dishes (frittata, shakshuka, soft scrambled eggs)
• Served with jam or marmalade and butter – or Confetti Pepper Jelly (yum!)
• Cubed and used for savory strata, such as Our Best Basic Sausage Breakfast Casserole
• As a base for breakfast sandwiches

Leftovers (once the bread becomes stale, if it ever lasts that long):

• Croutons (cubed, olive oil + oven roast)
• Panzanella (Italian bread salad)
• Focaccia grilled cheese
• Breadcrumbs for topping casseroles or roasted vegetables

We Made It Ours, Now Make It Yours

This started as a simple question — what kind of bread was that? — and ended with a focaccia that now feels like ours. I know I’ll make it again and again, for family dinners, casual gatherings, and quiet afternoons when I just feel like kneading dough and want the house to smell like olive oil and yeast. If you try the recipe, change it, or serve the focaccia in a way I haven’t thought of yet, I hope you’ll come back and tell me. That kind of sharing is the fun part (other than the eating).

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