Focaccia - Focaccia Bread - Focaccia Recipe - Rasa Malaysia (2024)

FAQs

How unhealthy is focaccia bread? ›

A moderate consumption of focaccia bread can be healthy. It is because complex carbs in focaccia offer the body energy slowly and help control blood sugar levels. In addition, it gains an advantage if it contains whole wheat flour. It is also rich in vitamin, mineral, and fibre content.

Venetian focaccia is sweet, baked for Easter and resembles the traditional Christmas cake panettone. Sugar and butter are used instead of olive oil and salt. Focaccia barese, which is common in Puglia in southern Italy, is made with durum wheat flour and topped with salt, rosemary, tomatoes or olives.

Focaccia made with high-protein bread flour produces the best results, but all-purpose flour will work as well.

“It does not contain simple sugars like sucrose, the classic white sugar, which promotes blood glucose spikes responsible for sudden hunger pangs. Rather, focaccia provides complex carbohydrates that slowly give the body energy and help better regulate blood sugar levels,” Schirò explains.

So why does it tend to be more expensive to purchase? Friends who have worked in the restaurant industry had some thoughts: Focaccia requires a lot of olive oil, which is pricey (though some other breads call for butter and eggs, which pencil out to more in my own Kirkland-brand-olive-oil kitchen).

But though pizza can stand in for a meal, focaccia is more of a snack, or at most an appetizer. In Italy, it's a popular walking-around food. Also, though cold pizza may have a certain raffish charm, focaccia really needs to be eaten when it's hot to be at its best.

Thick or thin? The thickness of a focaccia can vary, too, but an authentic focaccia genovese should be rather thin, even if it needn't be quite as thin as my version presented here. So many non-Italian renditions of “focaccia” are more like bread in their thickness.

Key Ingredients

Flour: Flour with a high protein content (at least 11%) is essential for strong gluten formation leading to that fluffy texture we know and love! I typically use bread flour or Antimo Caputo's 00 Flour. In a pinch, you can use King Arthur's all-purpose flour, which has a protein content of 11.7%.

Why is my focaccia not fluffy or chewy? It could be the type of flour you used. The best flour to use to make focaccia bread is bread flour which gives you fluffy baked bread. Or, it could also be because you did not knead the dough enough for the gluten to form a structure which can result in flat or dense bread.

Can you let focaccia dough rise too long? ›

The longer you allow the dough to rise, the more air and spongey the bread will be. Overnight Dough: Proofing the dough for 9-14 hours overnight in the fridge is my preferred method, because of the slower fermentation. This process yields a better focaccia texture and taste.

Advertisem*nt: After the first rise, many recipes call for the baker to deflate — or "punch down" — the dough. It's an important step: When the dough is punched down, the yeast cells are redistributed. They form a closer bond with the moisture and sugar, which aids fermentation and improves the second rise.

Can you overproof focaccia dough? You can definitely overproof focaccia, but it is difficult. There is so much oil in the dough, and very little sugar, so the yeast is "sleepy" or slow due to both of those elements and less likely to overproof.

May Provide Satiety. If your focaccia bread is made according to tradition with extra virgin olive oil, this makes it heartier, with more protein and fats, than your average bread. It also makes it more filling and satisfying.

Sourdough is more nutritious, easier to digest, and has a lower glycemic index. Sourdough also contains less gluten than other bread.

When you pair prebiotic bread with probiotic KeVita, something beautiful happens. Follow the recipe to bake a focaccia loaf that is topped with delicious prebiotic ingredients that help feed the good bacteria in your gut. Whisk together the flour, kosher salt, and yeast in a bowl.