Some Notes on Focaccia

I've taken a break from photographing my cooking (which has been rather unexciting this week anyway), but there were some things I wanted to write about focaccia. 

Many people seem to think that focaccia and pizza are the same thing.  Because pizza is quite different from region to region in Italy, this does make sense.  In fact, focaccia can also be quite different from region to region.  My mother just told me today that many of her friends outside of Genoa (where she lives) request that she bring the Ligurian variety when she visits.

The two differ in their most basic forms, their "standards."  I believe the standard in Genoa is "normale" which is topped with olive oil and coarse salt (and is magical, by the way).  Whereas the margherita (named for Queen Margherita in the late 1800s when she visited Naples) set the standard for pizza in Italy by reflecting the tri-colored Italian flag with buffalo mozzarella, tomato sauce and basil. 

Note the awesome pizza knife.

Both pizza and focaccia doughs are made of water, yeast, oil, high-gluten flour and salt.  And focaccia dough can be used as a pizza base.  Also, both doughs can be found topped with a variety of ingredients, though in the U.S. the standard is tomato sauce and cheese.  This is still my favorite and I ordered this basic version of pizza twice in Italy, at two different restaurants. 

Note the impossibly thin crust.

Enough about pizza.  It's making me hungry for pizza I can't get in the U.S. and that is just not fair.

Let's get back to focaccia.  In Italy, focaccia is a regular snack.  You can find it at any and every bakery in a variety of flavors.  I had a small piece of focaccia, a Pink Lady apple and a cup of espresso for breakfast every day that I was there.  The secca (dry) was particularly good for scooping up Caponata, which my mom made for me only after much harassment.

If you live near San Francisco and you'd like to try Ligurian focaccia, go to Liguria Bakery on the corner of Stockton and Filbert in North Beach before 9am.  If you go any later, you won't have that many options left (or they'll be completely sold out, usually by 1030am).  I've heard that this bakery supplies most of the city's Italian restaurants with the focaccia they put in their bread baskets.  The rosemary and garlic one is my favorite.

If you are, however, in Genoa...oh, there are so many amazing kinds.  My favorites were normale (coarse sea salt and olive oil), salve (sage, which was amazing) and secca (dry, which lasts longer than the others, so we always buy a ton of it).  I also tried zucchini focaccia, olive focaccia and pepperoni focaccia.  Pepperoni is not a meat, by the way.  It actually means bell peppers.  The girl helping us at the bakery by my mom's apartment found this American mistranslation hilarious.  I suppose it's like "pudding" in the U.S. versus in the U.K...no, it's worse.

In any case, you can find focaccia in grocery stores in the U.S., but I've never had one that was anything close to what I had in Italy.  Liguria Bakery or another bakery known for its bread is probably your best bet.  The fresher, the better.  If I could afford to drive to San Francisco every morning (except Sunday) to buy focaccia, I would do it.  Since I can't, my aim is to fiddle around with a few recipes until I can make something akin to the kind made at the bakery down the street from my mother and stepfather's apartment in Genoa.  Hopefully it won't end up being one of the recipes I found which has quite a bit of lard in it.