Focaccia alla Barese: Apulian Onion, Anchovy & Olvie Focaccia - Modern Bakers

Modern Bakers has moved into a new section of Nick Malgieri's book, the Modern Baker. For the next three months, we will be baking and blogging from the yeast-risen specialties section.

This Focaccia is a traditional Christmas Eve antipasto in Apulia. Apulia is an area in Southeastern Italy. I was attracted to this recipe by the use of anchovies. You don't like anchovies you say? I once heard a chef say that anchovies were one of the hidden ingredients, that add a depth of flavor, to a large number of his dishes. If people don't know that they are there, they love them.

These anchovies are not hidden, but boy do they add some flavor.

You start by making the focaccia dough from flour, salt, yeast, water and olive oil. The dough is allowed to rise in the bowl for 1 to 2 hours and then the slack dough is put into a prepared 11x17 pan. Where it rises for another hour.



While the dough is rising, a large thinly sliced onion is sauteed in olive oil until softened and beginning to color. 2 oz of anchovies in olive oil are drained, chopped and added to the onions and sauteed for one minute. Allow the onion, anchovy mixture to cool. Some gaeta and cerignola olives are pitted and quartered and added to the mixture. I couldn't find these olives, so I used a pleasing mixture of black and green olives.



Dimple the fococcia with your fingers, sprinkle on the topping and add a little kosher salt and a drizzle of olive oil. The upper right corner is missing the olives, for the olive hater...




This was so delicious, we devoured it.

Pita Bread Modern Baker

I signed up to make the pita bread in the bread section of Nick Malgieri's The Modern Baker for the Modern Baker Challenge. I have made these pitas four times, but blogging has been the real challenge.

It is the same excuse every time. I make these for dinner, I get picture of the process up to the end product. By the time we pull them out of the oven, I am putting things on the table. We sit, we laugh, we eat.... We eat them all before I photograph them.

Today I decided to make these while I was alone in the house. Emily and Tom had to go to school early this morning for a mandatory meeting on going to college. No one was thrilled to leave the house on a Saturday morning. Maybe fresh pitas for lunch will perk them up.

This is an easy recipe. The mis en place consists of flour, salt, warm water, olive oil and yeast.



The salt and flour are combined, the yeast is mixed into the water and then the olive oil is added. The liquids are combined with the flour for two minutes and then the dough rests for 10 mins.

The dough is kneaded for a few minutes, allowed to double then divided into 12 pieces.



The pieces rest and then are rolled into rounds.



The rounds rest and then are baked. I've made a batch of hummus and some tzatziki and everything is ready for lunch.

I find that I need to add an extra 1/4 cup of flour to this recipe. I also find that sometimes my pitas puff and sometimes they don't. I don't exactly know why. But this recipe is a keeper.

Sweet Rusks for Dunking - The Modern Baker

The Modern Bakers are baking our way through Nick Malgieri's The Modern Baker. We started with the quick breads. We have embarked on participatory group blogging. We claimed certain recipes to blog about and then bake/blog about whatever other recipes catch our fancy.

The sweet rusks for dunking appealed to me on several levels. Sweet rusks are a quick bread that have been baked so long that it becomes impossible to eat them without dunking them in tea or coffee. Nick says that sweet rusks are common in South Africa and the Netherlands. I work with a woman who is from the Netherlands; I am interested in her critique of the recipe.

I live in a house of backpackers. They have taken pilot biscuits, or hardtack, on some of their trips. I'm not sure that they enjoyed pilot biscuits but I hoped that the sweet rusks would be a delightful backpacking snack.

I assembled the flour, oats, sugar, baking powder, salt, butter, egg and buttermilk.



The flour, oats, sugar, baking powder and salt were combined in a food processor.



The butter was pulsed into the flour mixture. The egg was whisked into the buttermilk, then added to the processor. The mixture was dumped onto a floured surface divided into thirds.




Each third was rolled out and then each log was divided into 12 pieces.



At this point, I would suggest putting the remaining dough balls in the refrigerator. They quickly got more difficult to work with as they warmed up.

The pieces were supposed to be put in a 9 x 13 pan that had been coated with buttered foil. I missed that part. It is up by the ingredients in the top right. Any way, I sprayed my 9x13 pan with cooking spray and didn't have any problems. Nick wants you to put them 9 x 4 in the pan. I couldn't quite fit the 9 so ended up 7 x 5.




The rusks were baked until they were golden, in a 350 oven for 40 mins.




Then they were cooled, broken apart and then arranged on their sides onto cookie sheets.

At this point, some children came down the stairs and ate the not yet dried out biscuits and enjoyed them.


I think that if I had used a knife to separate the pieces, they would have been more prone to staying on their sides for the final drying period. They were returned to the 250 oven for 1.5 hours.



After you have dried out the biscuits, you are left with a pretty tasty little morsel. Hard as can be, maybe even dangerous to the teeth if you don't dunk them in coffee, but tasty, in a subtle fashion.

I brought some in to work and had my Dutch friend, Anneke, try them. She was impressed by how dried out they were. They are not something that she is familiar with, they were not part of her childhood.