How One of NYC’s Best Bakeries Makes Focaccia

[oil sizzling] [upbeat music]

I'm Kelly Mencin, the chef/owner

of Radio Bakery in New York City

and today we are gonna make my perfect version of focaccia.

We were just named by the New York Times

one of the best bakeries in the United States.

One of our specialties is focaccia.

Focaccia is typically an airy, chewy, flat-ish

loaf of bread, thin crust, dark on the bottom,

maybe a little bit oily, and can be eaten by itself

or filled or topped.

We're gonna make our sausage and chai focaccia.

It's a three day process for us here.

The first day we make the starter,

the second day it gets mixed, proofed,

then put in the walk-in, and then the third day it gets

proofed again and then baked.

First thing we're gonna do is mix our levain.

[upbeat music]

A levain is an offshoot of your starter.

A sourdough starter is just flour

and water is what develops flavor and microbes and yeast.

It eventually becomes active

and that is what's gonna help leaven our bread.

We're gonna use about 60 degrees Fahrenheit water

because we want our levain to sit overnight room temp.

We wanna keep it super cold.

We're gonna do water first in the mixer so that none

of the flour clumps up.

All right.

You can mix levain easily by hand,

but we are making such a large batch

that we're gonna do it in the mixer.

If you can't make a starter, a lot of bakeries will give you

a little bit of their starter

that you can just use to create your own levain.

Now we're making a video and I cannot have 20 people

coming in here on a daily basis,

I urge you to reach out to your other local bakeries

and see if they can give you a little bit of their starter.

And then we're gonna scale out our flour.

We use King Arthur special patent bread flour for this dough

because it's super high in protein, it's about 14%

and it's really consistent.

And for focaccia, we want high gluten, we want chewy,

and we want the bread to be able to really expand

and that's what high protein bread flour allows us to do.

Whole wheat and other specialty flour

is what gives different breads it's distinct flavor.

Whole wheat flour also helps aid

in the fermentation of our levain.

Rule of thumb is the more whole wheat,

the more whole grain flour you have in your bread

or your levain, the faster it's gonna ferment.

Now we're gonna go into our mixer.

We're gonna let that mix.

You can see it's nice and smooth.

There's no dry lumps of flour, so this is the amount

of levain for like, 40 focaccias for tomorrow.

I'm gonna pull a little bit out of it for the focaccia

that we're gonna make in a little bit,

but I'm doing production for my team.

So we are gonna put this in our big camrose.

This is gonna grow double in size,

so you do want enough room in your container.

And now I'm gonna show you how to autolyse the dough.

[upbeat music]

So we mix our levain earlier in the day.

He's been sitting at room temp, getting nice and active.

Now we're gonna start mixing our dough,

which will incorporate that starter.

So we're gonna start with our autolyse.

Big word, very simple, and autolyse is flour

and water mixed together.

You don't wanna go too hot

because that's gonna speed up proofing

and basically over proof your dough.

You don't wanna go too cold

because then you'll be sitting here waiting for the dough

to proof for hours and hours and hours.

At home you may not have a thermometer,

and that's totally okay.

You wanna go for room temp water.

77. 77 degrees

is our ideal temp.

Things are constantly changing when it comes to bread,

and you can't always catch that on a recipe.

Even now we have a little board over there

where what water temp we want.

It is what makes restaurant bakery bread different than home

bread because we're really honing in on the details

and the temperature and the time.

What I'm actually gonna do is scale all the water in here,

but then I'm gonna hold back.

We say about 5%, and we're gonna add it to the dough

later on and it's gonna help incorporate the salt

into the dough a little bit better.

Now we're gonna scale our flour.

This flour is the best.

It develops gluten really easy.

I'm just gonna go over to the mixer and mix.

Whenever you're making any bread or dough,

water in first.

You could use a KitchenAid, but you could also absolutely

do this by hand.

That's how we developed it.

We developed this recipe by hand

in our New York City apartments.

We're gonna let this go for about a minute.

If you're doing this by hand at home,

you really are just getting your hands in there

and making sure you're mixing it

until there's no dry flower spots.

So this is what it looks like right after it's been mixed.

If this dough is not mixed enough

or doesn't get enough strength from all the folding,

it's what you will really see is that your dough

is super flat.

We are gonna leave this for about 25 to 30 minutes

and that's really just to make sure

that all the flour gets super hydrated.

So timer is running for 30 minutes

on our autolyse for focaccia.

While we're waiting on that,

we're gonna scale out the other necessary ingredients

for focaccia.

We use fine sea salt.

It has a higher sodium content than just kosher salt.

People are gonna say that Radio sourdough is not real

sourdough because there's yeast in it,

but we use less than 2% of yeast in all of our bread

because a little bit of just instant active yeast

makes sure that our dough is consistent every single day.

Salt and yeast, I'm gonna put these with my water

that I set aside so I have everything ready to go.

This dough has been autolysing for about 28 minutes now

and you can see how different the dough is.

See how extensible that is?

Just 30 minutes ago it was like, falling apart in my hand

and now it's super strong and that's a really good sign.

Now we are gonna add our small amount of yeast right on top.

So our yeast is on there, and then we're gonna add

our levain that was mixed earlier in the day

and has been ripening for several hours,

which is gonna give us flavor

and a little bit of like, sourdough tang,

but it's also gonna help leaven it.

We're gonna go for about four minutes

and this is just to help incorporate

the yeast in the starter.

We're not really developing gluten yet.

We're gonna scrape it down because we wanna make sure we get

every little bit incorporated in here.

If there's any dry spots on the side, it's just gonna make

for the dough that's not mixed very cohesively

and we want a nice smooth elastic dough.

We're gonna start another four minutes.

We're gonna slowly start adding the salt

and then we're gonna stream in the water

and the dough will actually break apart again

while we add the water.

If you're scared, if you feel like it's too sticky,

leave a little bit water out.

It'll make it easier to handle.

The air bubbles might be a little bit smaller,

but it'll taste great.

This is the scary part, right?

When people do this at home,

the dough is completely coming apart.

You just have to have faith. Just keep mixing.

The dough just came outta the mixer.

We're putting it in our bus tub.

We're gonna give it a couple folds

just to make sure it is all cohesive and even.

It's already pretty strong.

We're gonna put a lid on this.

We're gonna set a timer for 30 minutes

and then come back and give it another fold.

[upbeat music]

We're going for four folds every 30 minutes

to help develop gluten.

After mixing, the dough has been resting for 30 minutes.

If you're at home and you couldn't develop the gluten

enough, like weed it in the mixer, the slap and fold

is gonna be like, really crucial to developing the gluten.

It has relaxed and really spread out in the bus tub.

I'm gonna spin it, get my hands in water again.

Pull, pull, pull.

The dough is in this like, nice cohesive mass

and it's back to being a strong little packet.

So we're gonna put a lid on this, give it another 30 minutes

and basically give it three more folds.

So by your last fold you wanna be a little bit more gentle.

So that is our last slap and fold.

Now we're gonna put the lid on.

It's gonna increase in size, take over the container

before we shape it.

[upbeat music]

This is my favorite part of making bread.

This has been proofing for about three hours.

What we are looking for now is that the dough fills the bin,

and not only does it fill the bin, but there's some tension

and rounding of it on the sides of the bin.

We are gonna shape.

As I mentioned, this is a very, very sticky dough.

The best way to work with it is with lots

of water on your hands.

We use these special pans, they're called Lloyd Pans.

They're basically deep dish style pizza pans.

They're amazing, they conduct heat very well

and I just have like, a fine layer of oil in here.

It should be enough to coat the bottom

so that it doesn't stick to the pan.

I'm gonna get my hands a little wet.

This means that the dough is nice and strong.

You can see it holding onto itself.

If it doesn't have any tension

or if it's moving all over the table, it could be a sign

that doesn't have enough strength and therefore might not

have enough rise in oven.

For this, this looks amazing and I'm really happy for it.

This is a good tip for proofing dough or your starter.

If you put the dough in water and it floats,

that means there's enough air in there

and that it's perfectly proofed.

We have since learned and like to give it a little bit

of stitching.

This helps with creating some tension in the dough

and it helps with the rise.

This dough likes to be told what to do

and so we give it a little boost.

And I'm making into a nice little packet.

I'm gonna press this packet out a little bit.

What we're really looking for is just an even amount

of dough in the pan.

Everyone likes their focaccia differently.

You want a super thick focaccia, [beep] go for it.

Fill the pan up.

I mean, it might explode when it's proofing,

but that's what it's all about.

[upbeat music]

We have just divided and shaped our focaccia.

Now we're gonna put it on our speed rack with the rest

of our focaccia that we did earlier in the day

and we're gonna let it sit for about an hour

and a half to two hours.

This helps relax the dough, proof it a little bit more.

It's been about two hours.

The focaccia is basically touching the lid of the pan.

You can see there's some air bubbles happening here

and it's super relaxed.

We're gonna put the bread and the walk-in overnight

and what we really want is to just cool it down

and stop the proofing so that we can come in tomorrow

and then bake it fresh.

If you wanted to shorten this, you could proof it

for a little bit longer and bake it immediately.

We have done that, but since we are in a bakery setting,

this is what works for our schedule.

[upbeat music]

These are the focaccias that we shaped yesterday.

They went in the walk-in overnight just to chill.

Typically, we would pull these out at 5:00 AM when my bakers

come in the morning, and they should look cold.

There's still lots of air in them,

but they're really cold and tight.

If I was at home and I had focaccia in the walk-in,

I would just pull it out first thing in the morning,

later in the afternoon, let it sit at ambient temp

for 2, 3, 4 hours.

It's not gonna over proof.

What you are really looking for is for it

to just equalize in temperature.

I'm just really trying to stretch it to fill the pan

so that it stays nice and square

because this is gonna become 10 sandwiches

or eight pieces of focaccia

and we wanna make sure that everyone has a nice equal piece.

Bubbles are starting to form.

This is what we're looking for

and this is what we mean by proofing.

This means our dough is very active

and we call this a a happy dough.

We're gonna pop 'em in the proofer

to just heat them up to ambient temp.

If you're making these at home,

I would recommend covering it

with the towel or plastic wrap.

This is our proofer retarder.

It's a very magical piece of equipment.

It's just a box that can pump humidity

and keep a solid temperature.

These are going in at 28 degrees Celsius

and like, 80% humidity.

The humidity just makes sure

that nothing is gonna crust over.

If something crusts over, then it can't expand.

We're just gonna quickly proof this for about an hour.

Let it relax.

We'll see some more bubbles and we'll come back to it later.

[upbeat music]

Our focaccia has been proofing

for a little bit over an hour in our proofer.

We have like, an ever rotating focaccia toppings.

We have a sausage and chive, a olive and grape and rosemary,

and then we always have a tomato focaccia.

With the sausage and chive focaccia, we're really going

for like, creamy, crunchy, fatty

and then like, fresh oniony chives.

It's just like, the perfect combination of textures

and flavors that it really hits all the right notes.

Now we're gonna make our sausage and chive focaccia.

We're gonna go just straight up creme fraiche first.

Creme fraiche has a high heat tolerance,

so it's not gonna break when exposed to heat.

Sour cream will break when it's exposed to high heat.

Now we're gonna add our sausage, which is bacon trimmings,

prosciutto trimmings, a little smoky, a little fatty.

I'm gonna add a little bit of our good olive oil

and then we're gonna dock it.

This is called Golden Nana olive oil.

It is buttery and light and bright.

The dimpling is really important

because we wanna make sure

that we are spacing the air bubbles out evenly

and don't be afraid to touch the bottom of the pan.

One confident dock.

The more you dock, the more you're gonna knock out air.

We're gonna put this in our deck oven.

These are gonna bake for about 15 to 18 minutes

until they're super toasty on the bottom

and evenly brown on top.

The deck oven is super special

because it has stones on the bottom

that's gonna help regulate the heat

and really make sure that the bottom

of this gets nice and toasty.

You can absolutely make this at home in your home oven.

If you have a pizza stone, that is a great start.

So we are baking these at 550.

The bottom stones are at 100% heat

and then we have it on 50% heat on top

and we found that that creates like, the nice perfect

golden crust.

The most important thing is you want to bake it

hot and fast.

Okay, we're gonna pull her out.

This has been about 15 minutes.

The sausage and chive, the bottom goes really quick

because there's so much fat coming down from the bacon

and stuff and so it really helps with like, the crustiness.

It's literally frying in the fat and olive oil.

Smells like bacon in here.

We're gonna check the bottom.

Like, dark golden brown.

That's great.

We're gonna put this here.

This gets finished with lots of chives,

and that's gonna give it its fresh oniony flavor

and help cut the fat of the bacon and the creme fraiche.

We're gonna do a little bit more olive oil.

Some guests love the burnt crusty ends.

Some guests prefer the middle.

Everyone gets what they want out of this.

We're looking for, there's some nice beautiful air pockets.

We've got little buckets of creme fraiche and our sausage,

and then the bottom is just super, super crisp

and golden brown, and that's the perfect one.

Eating this focaccia hot out of the oven is like,

one of the best things you could eat here.

Fatty from the bacon, the creme fraiche, slightly greasy.

We love the little greasy fingers,

super crunchy on the bottom, and then like, fresh

and oniony from the chives.

Hits all the notes.

People often ask us, Why do you sell it so early?

We are a very small bakery

and this is a three day process to make our focaccia.

Ours is so unique because of the time

and effort that goes into it.

[upbeat music]

This is my favorite step

because I feel like I'm like, a child again.

Like, just able to like, play.

To see the end product is, it's magic.

It really is.