The nice thing about focaccia is that the goal is for it to be basically a liquid. That means you don’t have to worry about it being a bountiful loaf shape - you want it to lie flat and just be bubbly.  But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have to be well developed.

Focaccia has a low % of yeast, but a little goes a long way. Although the yeast will eventually colonize the whole of your bread dough, we combine a slow fermentation process (including cold proofing, which slows things down) to keep this in check.

Here’s a breakdown of the process/bread tactics that you can add to any recipe:

• Poolish - a pre-ferment. taking a portion of your water and flour from the recipe and mixing it with a little tiny bit of yeast and leaving it for 12 hours - the result is a bubbly, aroma filled mass

• Autolyse - This is a technique where you mix your flour, yeast and water together (sans salt) and leave it for 30 mins to fully absorb and hydrate, building gluten as it goes. Although some bakers will say autolyse is when you mix just flour and water together (no yeast), you’ll be including your yeast

• Holding back the salt - During the autolyse, the salt is held back. Salt is a water hog so you’re allowing the flour to fully hydrate. As well as this, holding the salt back gives the yeast a chance to get going without salt hindering it

• Stretch n folds - A gentle way to get involved with your dough - this part feels so good xD

• Cold fermentation - An exercise in strength and flavor building

How to favor flavor

So, from the list of actions by the yeast above, why not just add additional rises to your bread, knocking it back over and over again until the desired level of flavor development is reached?

Well, you could. But it’s more sensible to use some other tactics.

, pre-ferments provide a layer of flavor and jump start on strength-building. 

Cold fermentation, however, and the reason why this focaccia takes 3 days, is a great lesson in both patience paying off and flavor. To understand this, we have to remember that yeast is a fungi and loves a warm environment and that temperature is really the only real thing that speeds up fermentation. Useful as it is if you’re in a rush to get the bread filled with CO2, it doesn’t favor flavor. 

Cold fermentation will slow the yeast activity right down which is a good thing, because when the yeast isn’t going absolutely nuts digesting sugar and producing CO2, it is really helpful in a flavor creating process called the Alpha Amylase Reaction. 

Although this does happen if you just left flour and water on its own, yeast - when under control in a cold environment - can provide some useful enzyme action to coax those flavors out, and provide new dimensions for your bread.

Cold fermentation is also useful in helping get the absolute best texture from your bread. Although your dough may look extremely hydrated and happy as-is, you’ll have to trust me that it goes up a level when it spends time in the fridge. Left for a prolonged period of time, the gluten is fully hydrated through autolysis creating an even stronger gluten network that provides an even more dramatic and noticeably improved structure to your bread. Since you are shaping focaccia AFTER the cold proof, you get to benefit from that ultra strong gluten development and well-aerated structure aka bubble town.

An oil enriched focaccia crumb is something of beauty especially when you’re doing something with high hydration - the crumb is both tender and chewy with thinly stretched crisp walls from the large irregular pockets of airbubbles - it’s a joy to eat.

Don’t forget to use good olive oil and don’t scrimp! I rarely scale the olive oil that I use for the focaccia, choosing to do it by eye instead. , I just add olive oil when I can no longer see any! Once it's been absorbed by the dough, I just add a little more. It’s helpful for the stretching process, too, so your hands don’t get stuck