No Knead Focaccia (Cheese Focaccia) Recipe - The Cookie Rookie® (2024)

FAQs

What is the best flour to use for focaccia? ›

Use your favorite kind—I prefer extra virgin olive oil. Bread Flour or All-Purpose Flour: I tested this focaccia with both and prefer the bread flour variety. Both are great, but bread flour has a higher protein content so it yields a chewier texture.

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.

Not enough water: This can leave you with dense, dry focaccia. For accuracy, measure out your ingredients using weight instead of cups to ensure you have the right ratio of ingredients.

Olive oil: Makes focaccia taste delicious, adding to its texture and flavor. The secret to the best focaccia bread is using a great olive oil.

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.

Now, focaccia uses plenty of olive oil, not only in the dough, but for kneading, proofing, in the baking pan, and on the bread's surface before baking. All this fat means the texture is light, moist and springy, the crust emerges golden and crisp, plus the center stays soft for days afterwards.

Add Sugar

Adding sugar weakens the gluten structure, absorbs water, and eventually makes the bread lighter and softer. As a result, sugar improves the bread's taste, structure and texture. Yeast also eats up sugar to produce carbon dioxide, which raises the dough and makes bread fluffy.

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.

Tips for the perfect homemade Focaccia.

Don't over-knead your dough– In the first step, make sure the dough has come together enough that it's sticky but not smooth, this will help to make the much desired air bubbles.

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.

How sticky should focaccia dough be? ›

Yes. It is a high hydration dough, so it is sticky. The Olive Oil is to help stop it sticking to the bowl and your fingers when you shape it, but remember the pan holds the shape for you so it is ok that the dough doesn't have much structure. It will feel like a bit of a gloppy mess.

Give the dough 4 sets of stretch and folds at 30-minute intervals, where the first set starts 30 minutes after the start of bulk fermentation.

Pan of Choice for Baking – You can bake focaccia using any of these three options – cake pans, a sheet pan, a large baking dish. See below for more details. Parchment Paper – Parchment paper is key for this focaccia. It will make the bread very easy to remove from the pans – you'll be glad you used it!

Different surfaces affect focaccia texture in different ways. Baking sheets give a thinly crunchy bottom. Cast-iron pans (put in the oven) give more of a nuanced crunch. Our favorite cooking vessel for focaccia is a baking stone lightly sprinkled with semolina flour.

Grease a sheetpan with butter and gentle stretch the dough into a flat rectangle covering the sheetpan. Cover and set aside for 30 minutes. Pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius. Dimple the dough with your fingers and distribute the cubed butter evenly over the dough.

While bread flour is the best option, it can sometimes be used if you don't have bread flour. “Check the protein content,” advises Chef Jürgen, since it can vary from brand to brand, and an all-purpose flour that contains protein on the higher end of the range, 12 to 13 percent, will produce a better outcome.

For best results, base your yeast dough on wheat flour — only wheat-based flour provides the type and amount of protein yeast dough needs to support its structure. Whole wheat flour, white whole wheat flour, bread flour, or all-purpose flour are all good choices.

Grano tenero flours are generally used in Italy to make both bread and pastries. Typo 2 (type 2) flour is high in bran, and still slightly coarse.