Italian Focaccia Flatbread Economics by Ruth Paget
Even if you buy fresh herbs and produce like garlic, onions, and tomatoes at the supermarket, making focaccia (Italian flatbread) is relatively inexpensive. However, if you use herbs that grow at home to make focaccia, the savings increase exponentially.
Carol Field provides many recipes in her cookbook Foccacia: Simple Bread from the Italian Oven that can save a family a lot of money, if it is eaten once or twice a week. It can also be used as a teaching moment with children as the French royal tutor Fénélon would say.
Field writes in her introduction that the most famous focaccia comes from Genoa located in the coastal Liguria region between the French border in the north and Tuscany where Florence is located in the south.
The basic dough for Genoa’s focaccia flatbread is made with flour, water, yeast, and sometimes olive oil and white wine. The yeast dough rises twice before being brushed with olive oil and baked. Field counsels home cooks to use a baking stone to generate high heat for crunchy crust.
Field writes that Italians often use a dough starter called a biga in Italian made of water, flour, and yeast that is allowed to ferment before mixing it in with the regular dough. The biga gives the final product extra flavor and a chewy interior. The Genoese often add white wine to the dough and dimple it, so they can form little pools of warm olive oil, sea salt, and chopped herbs.
Some of Field’s recipes are so easy and delicious that you want to ask yourself, “Did I really not know how to make this bread before?”
The easiest recipes make a nice meal with salad and vinaigrette dressing, cheese, fruit salad, and white wine like pinot grigio or homemade lemonade.
Several recipes that families might like follow:
-basil topped focaccia
-focaccia with rosemary, oil, and salt
-focaccia with garlic and tomato topping
-focaccia with garlic and herb topping
-schiacciata covered in caramelized onions
(schiacciata is the word for focaccia in Florence)
-schiacciata with slices of tomato and shredded basil
Carol Field has recipes for more elaborate focaccia, but the ones listed above illustrate what I consider the Italian genius for living well on a budget thanks to being highly skilled, organized, and well educated.
Field’s Focaccia: Simple Bread from the Italian Oven belongs on every kitchen bookshelf.
By Ruth Paget, author Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
