Thursday 28 July 2011

Focaccia!


Crossing the Adriatic from northern Greece to southern Italy on the night ferry’s reclining chairs left us feeling anything but restored.  An awful cappuccino on board provided a caffeine jolt and no other pleasure.

As we rolled back onto land at Bari port we needed something delicious to kickstart our arrival in Italy. We found it in focaccia. 



This may have been a down and out dockside suburb, but the baker at this most ordinary panificio was doing a good trade in what to me is still a gourmet treat. Great rounds of olive oil-spiked flatbread swiftly transported from the woodfired oven to his colleague’s marble bench to slice, package and weigh for salivating customers.

We ate ours in a slightly trashy and rather unItalian way, in the car on the 130km/hr superstrada from Bari to Ostuni, gushing in a not original way about Italian food.

The bread is focaccia barese – it uses a similar dough to pizza, and like many Mediterranean flatbreads is derived from the flatbreads of the Ancient Greeks [for whom southern Italian provinces were part of Magna Graecia] with oil, salt and herbs.

Focaccia barese has three classic toppings: potato and rosemary; tomato and olive; and herb. But most panificio (bakery) or focacceria offer an expanded range beyond these classics, including hams, cheeses and vegetables, and sometimes as fillings rather than toppings.

That dockside sample was a perfectly good introduction to focaccia barese but was soon displaced by more interesting toppings.

My favourite places (both in Ostuni) were:

A topping of grilled aubergine and peppers made a more complete lunch.

A slice of a rectangular traybake version with sweet roast onions embedded in the rich bread was more in like a moist apple cake in texture than a bread, falling apart with silky onions.

Focaccia in Puglia tends to be eaten in the morning or for a light lunch. Different flavours are brought out throughout the morning so you may not see the full complement on a single visit. Focaccia is also often served by pizzerias – focaccia during the day and pizza at night.

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