The Year Of Focaccia: Our Fantasy Flatbread Renaissance Is Here

By Kim Knight
Viva
Focaccia has returned with fervour. Photo / Getty Images.

In the future, historians will know us by our bread.

Sourdough? The great autumnal lockdown of 2020. Cinnamon scrolls? The shorter shelter-in-place orders of February this year. Focaccia? You had it for lunch five times last week.

The bread with more holes than bread is back.

Earlier this month, musician James Milne, aka Lawrence Arabia, posted a simple question to social media: “Can anyone accurately date the great New Zealand focaccia boom? I’m thinking c.1999-2004.”

And thus, the flatbread floodgates opened and the Great Yeast Debates of Aotearoa began. Sample correspondence: “It definitely coincided with the late antipasto platter period, which had its genesis back in the upper sundried tomato civilisation.” Yvonne Lorkin (wine writer).

“Coincided with the great panini boom.” Sam Smith (music writer).

“I was definitely into it early 1993, coinciding with Nick Cave playing at the Town Hall in Auckland.” Rachael King (excellent writer).

But everything new will once be old, and so it is with focaccia.

“How one did enjoy a coffee and yards of Italian bread,” wrote a travel blogger in the Otago Witness, circa 1872. “A crisp, porous substance in lengths of about a foot, in thickness like sticks of sealing wax.”

Was this early influencer consuming the focaccia future generations would grow to know, love and dunk in dukkah? It seems likely (though a trio of dips and a sundried tomato would have been the clincher). The internet cites Annabel Langbein and Ray McVinnie as New Zealand’s key contemporary focaccia adopters.

In my own home library, I find a kind of bible: The New Zealand Bread Book. There's focaccia on page 80, but this is a third edition, printed in 1996. Was it there in 1981, when the book was first published? No, says food historian and co-author Helen Leach.

“The earliest appearance ... is in the revised edition of 1989 ... the 1989 recipe is definitely the earliest so far in New Zealand.”

Do you remember your first focaccia? In this land of ham-and-white-sandwich-slice sandwiches, it was an Italian immigrant that signalled a culinary coming of age an early 90s gateway to olives and olive oil; to hummus and balsamic and the courgette as a zucchini.

Salt was for fish and chips but sea salt was for sophisticates who ate flatbread. Focaccia was pizza without pineapple, bread without butter and as worldly as a wine bottle shaped like a fish. Until it wasn’t. One day, you could buy focaccia in Ashburton. Just like that, Auckland invented the bagel.

But everything old will once again be new and so it is with focaccia.

Like velour and Birkenstocks, flip-phones and Winona Ryder, the flatbread’s time has come again. In the grimmest depths of the Northern Hemisphere’s 2020, it was focaccia and, very specifically, focaccia gardens that flooded social media feeds.

Locked-down bakers stretched a canvas from dough and painted it with baby tomatoes, onion crescents and fennel fronds. They couldn’t go to school, work or restaurants but they brought the outside inside. They made their world more beautiful with flatbread.

Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra is credited to have said “All sorrows are less with bread” and, this lockdown, New Zealanders took a loaf out of his book.

We have not gone full floral but we have joined the focaccia renaissance. Make it fast and simple or take your lead from Karangahape Rd’s Cotto restaurant and its step-by-step Insta-story guide to possibly the city’s most delicious example of the genre. Complicated and sultry, salty and oily, crunchy and springy. Eat it with your bare hands and dream of the day you can, once again, break bread with friends.

Photo / Babiche Martens
Photo / Babiche Martens

ANGELA CASLEY'S CLASSIC FOCACCIA BREAD RECIPEMakes 1 loaf

1 ½ cups tepid water2 tsp yeast2 tsp sugar¼ cup olive oil5 cups plain flour1 tsp saltExtra oil, for drizzlingToppingsRosemary sprigsCoarse sea salt1 cup olives

1. Place the water into a bowl. Combine the yeast and sugar, and sprinkle over the water. Allow to sit for 10 minutes until frothy. Then add the oil.

2. In a large bowl place the flour and salt. Make a hole in the middle and pour in the wet ingredients, stirring to form the dough. Place on to a lightly floured bench and knead for 5 minutes. Place the dough into a lightly oiled bowl, cover and place into a warm area for 1 hour or until doubled in size.

3. Remove the dough. Place it on a lightly oiled baking tray and press it into an oval shape around 30cm long. Let it rest again for 1 hour to rise.

4. Preheat an oven to 200C.

5. Using your fingertips, make indents in the dough and top with your choice of flavours. Drizzle with extra oil and bake for 20 minutes or until hollow-sounding when tapped.

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