I often forget that I know how to cook and bake. You ever do that? I’ll just be sitting there, craving a nice hunk of focaccia bread that is crisp on the outside, chewy on the inside, and with just a hint of seasoning, and I’ll spend hours trying to figure out where to buy such an item. Then it hits me–didn’t I pay some people a bunch of money a while ago to teach me how to cook and bake? And isn’t the hardest thing to do in bread baking just waiting for the damn dough to rise (I may be oversimplifying a bit here, but go with me)? Waiting that could be filled with television watching and Internet surfing? I was so there. Back in the day, I used to make focaccia bread all the time as a pastry chef. We would make ciabatta dough, and save all the leftover scraps for the focaccia. Then I’d take this bread frame, set it on a baking sheet, start pressing the scraps into the frame, dabbing each dough piece with some egg, piecing the bread together like a puzzle. I’d bake it, take it out of the mold, top it with some fancy cheese, maybe some olives or caramelized onion and some rosemary, and then bake into the oven to melt all the ingredients onto the bread. I knew it wasn’t technically a focaccia bread recipe that we used, but it still tasted tasty as hell.
For my focaccia, I decided to hit up Alton Brown’s baking book,I’m Just Here For More Food, where I found a lovely recipe for focaccia bread with heaps of wait time. Seriously. First you mix a few ingredients, let them sit 20 minutes. Then mix some more and let it rise for an hour. Then you punch it down, stretch and put on a baking sheet, cover with a towel and let rise for another 1 1/2 hours, and then of course the 20 minute wait while it bakes. This is not a busy day recipe! I liked Alton’s recipe because it had cornmeal in it, which gave the bread a nice texture and tasted delicious. I experimented with a few different toppings, including rosemary, garlic, sun dried tomatoes, and of course olive oil, salt and pepper. I am not sure what the copyright laws are for cookbooks, so if you want this recipe, go get the book. Plus, this isn’t a recipe blog. So stop trying to force my food blog into a cookie cutter mold and so just enjoy my bread porn what it is: deliciousness, damn it.
This bread was just begging for me to cut it and stuff it with pork products, hey, I’m weak and tend to listen to the advice of baked goods. I had to obey. I used C & D Farm Free-Range Italian hot sausage, pesto, mozzarella and sun dried tomatoes for my sandwich, before toasting it in a grill pan. Let me just say a word about this sausage. Some people think it is stupid to pay more for free range or properly raised meat, but after eating this sausage, I refuse to believe them. This is the most delicious, salty, porky sausage I have ever eaten, and it actually costs just as much as the crap you buy in the store. God bless farmers markets!
But there was a vegan lurking in my apartment that day. So I hit up some seitan, or grain meat, in Mexican chorizo flavor. It was shockingly not that bad! It actually tasted like real meat, and made my vegan friend love me a little more than before.
Look at this love:
I have never seen a happier vegan in my life. ~LTG!
