Focaccia with overnight fermentation

Focaccia fresh out from the oven

It's Bread Baking Day with Zora again. We got the incredibly difficult task to choose just one bread to bake from an incredible list of breads from the last world bread day that you can find on my website, here. There were so many contenders so I had to do a list of my favorite breads. But to be honest, actually all breads should be in my top favorites but I really had to narrow it down because I cannot bake all the breads from that event, can I? So anyway, my real favorites originally were those ones:

• The Pane Valle Maggia from Ninive
• A few of the breads from the mixed bread basket from the crowd of der-sauerteig.de 
• The awesome Pane Tipo Altamura that the brotdoc is prescribing us 
• A wonderful beer bread by Ylva (I LOVE beer breads)

But in the end, faced with so many choices, it was so difficult that I decided not to make any bread out of that list, even I will make them all another time. When I was re-browsing again through the list of all breads, I saw that six people actually made the Focaccia. So why not go with the most famous bread of this WBD? I always manage to NEARLY bake a Focaccia, this wonderful bread that knows how to elegantly combine my favorite fast food, the Pizza, with bread. How good can it get I am asking you? So this time, after I saw the very appetizing pictures of these Focaccia’s:

• Masterchef de Algibeira made one with black olives
• Bocadinhos de acucar Rosemary and cherry tomato
• Sugarprincess Juschka mit Trauben und karamellisierten Fenchelsamen
• Brie com goiabada with one that has potatoes and chilis
• A quick Garlic Tomato Focaccia bread by Bao / Bread from Hong Kong 
• Italy’s cindystar is making a focaccia with grapes? 

It was clear that I had to try and make a Focaccia.

Focaccia with brown surface and melted cheese, fresh from the oven

I remembered a Focaccia with an overnight polish that I have seen on the Ploetzblog before, so of course I decided to make that one instead of the before mentioned and as I made many breads following Lutz instructions and they always went quite well, I decided to do that again and make this focaccia base. But I changed quite a few thing. I took whey instead of water and I let the dough stay in the fridge over night for a long fermentation, then I also I added some olives, sun dried tomatoes, cheese, I added some dried herbs to the dough and I took my own infused oil that I still had in the fridge. So here goes my recipe.

Poolish

• 190 g wheat flour
• 190 g water
• 0,2 g fresh yeast

Mix all the poolish ingredients and let them rest for 14 - 18 hours at room temperature

main dough

• Poolish
• 360 g wheat flour
• 238 g whey
• 4 g fresh yeast
• 1 table spoon of dried thyme
• 10 g salt

herb infused oil

• 100 ml olive oil
• 1 garlic clove
• some herbs (see whatever fresh herbs you have and like
• 1 chili

Mince all the ingredients and rub the fresh herbs between your palms to release the oils before you infuse all the ingredients in the oil. Put everything in the fridge and let it infuse. The longer the better. I always have some infused herb oil that has infused a few weeks. But at least 12 hours should be minimum for the oil to take on some taste.

Topping

• green olives cut in half
• sun dried tomatoes
• 100 ml herb infused oil
• 50 g grated gran padano cheese
• olive oil to grease the baking pan

Toppings, sun dried tomatoes, olives, infused herb oil

Instructions:

1. Mix all the ingredients of the main dough together and knead them well, 7 minutes at least
2. Now let the dough rest for 2.5 hours and stretch and fold it every 30 - 45 minutes so the gluten structure can develop
3. Now pop the dough in a bowl and put it in the fridge for at least 12 hours



Dough stretched in the baking pan

4. Take the dough out of the fridge. Now grease a baking pan well with olive oil. Put the dough on the baking pan. Pour the herbs infused oil on top of the dough and start to stretch the dough on the pan with your fingers carefully apart. Don't use too much force or the dough will tear. Stretch the dough as wide as possible using your finger. There will be a lot of your finger marks in the dough. Leave them. Don't try to even them out. They will give the focaccia the typical look. Let it rest
5. After a 20 minutes rest at room temperature (best is around 25 Celsius), stretch the dough one more time using the above described method. Let it rest for another 10 minutes.



Toppings on the dough in the pan

6. Now add the toppings (but not yet the cheese) on top of the dough and massage them in with your fingers and let everything rest for about 30 minutes.
7. Now we pop the bread in the preheated oven at 250°C for about 20 minutes. Then we sprinkle the cheese on top and bake another 10 minutes to perfection.

Take out and enjoy this crispy, tasty and fluffy bread pure, with a soup or a salad, the other dish won't be so important as your fresh bread will be the main attraction of your meal anyway.

Participation:
This bread will be submitted and hopfully participate in the following baking events:

- Panissimo by Sandra and Barbara, which is hosted and organized this month organized by Menta-e-rosemarin
- Na zakwasie i na drożdżach, which (I believe) means something like Panissimo in Polish (it's been too long I have not been in Poland but I will support the sister event of Panissimo there anyway becuase they got some awesome breads there, don't miss out on checking it out).
- Like always, I will try to post this self-made bread to the wild yeast spotting webpage like every time I am baking one as I thing this awesome blog event always deserves my support
- This bread will be featured on Zora's Bread Baking day as discussed before, just click on the picture on the left.