For Love of Focaccia

Specialty loaves bring new flavors to your breadbasket

Winter-weary families often find respite in hearty meals to warm and energize them. Stews, casseroles, chowders or pasta dishes, often partnered with a fresh loaf of bread, can all be as soothing and satisfying as relaxing in a cozy chair near the fireplace. And just as the main course is enhanced when served alongside a crusty loaf, the bread itself is better with the addition of baked-in fillings, from cheeses to herbs, olives to tomatoes.

While there are scores of recipes on the Internet and in cookbooks to help home bakers create their own special breads, they can also be purchased from neighborhood bakeries like Pascale Bakehouse in Fayetteville, supermarkets such as Wegmans, and eatery chain shops like Panera Bread. At Pasta’s Daily Bread, 308 S. Franklin St., in Armory Square, wire racks hold loaves of freshly baked breads, many bejeweled with nuggets of olives, veggies or herbs, some with cheese melted into the dough.

Every day Pasta’s bakes several tempting versions of focaccia, flat Italian bread, including cracked pepper with cheddar, asiago, gorgonzola with onion, kalamata olive, sundried tomato and rosemary. There’s also an oblong loaf lavished with cheddar cheese and oregano. All of their breads are kneaded on-site in a giant, 50-year-old stand mixer imported from France and baked in heavy-duty commercial ovens. Each hearty loaf is priced between $3.85 and $4.50.

King Arthur bread flour and all-natural ingredients serve as the foundation for every loaf. In order to achieve a final product that’s tender on the inside and crusty on the outside, Pasta’s takes a slow, steady approach. “We have an overnight rise,” explains manager Jennifer Jacobson. “Once it’s done in the mixer, it actually rises for about 12 hours. A lot of people, when we run out, ask if we’ll be baking more. We will, but it’s a 12-hour rise.”

Bakery customers keep up a steady pace buying bread to take home and patrons who dine at the shop’s parent business, Pastabilities, or one of several neighboring restaurants will find it on the menu. “The specialty breads we tend to sell out here, so the restaurant doesn’t have so much of that,” Jacobson says. “But they do use them in the bread baskets. We sell to a lot of wholesale as well. Our neighbors Kitty Hoynes buy our bread. Blue Tusk is our biggest wholesale account. They use it for appetizers and for their sandwiches. Most of the restaurants down here do: bc Bistro, around the corner, Empire {Brewing Company} buys the bread once in a while. SU—we supply the university with a lot of bread when they’re in session. We sell also to the Real Food Co-op; they sell a lot of our bread. We have a pretty good wholesale business.”

Chefs at the local restaurants apply some creativity in treating customers to the taste of the breads. “Some of our wholesale accounts do specialty sandwiches and paninis,” Jacobson says. “They use it for croutons at some of the restaurants around here and for crostini and bruschetta kinds of things.”

Family chefs can use the focaccia in similar ways to the pros and it’s easy enough to dream up their own recipes. Any focaccio is a blank canvas, ready to grill, cube, use in stuffing or salads or top with any type of cheese, veggies, sausage or sauce, like a thick-crusted pizza.

Recipes that call for bread in almost any form can be a jumping-off point for experimenting with a specialty version. Think rosemary croutons, gorgonzola bruschetta, olive bread panzanella or tomato stuffing mix. And, of course, most any sandwich could be dressed up by wedging a delicious filling between slices of whichever bread you choose.

Consumers who need to reduce the salt in their diets may want to shy away from the rich and exotic, but salty, olive bread. “We use a Turkish black olive, a kalamata olive,” Jacobson reveals. “The olives are salty. The same amount of salt goes into it as for the stretch bread, but the olives are pretty intense, even after rinsing them.”

Sundried tomatoes are purchased from local suppliers and the bakery gets weekly cheese deliveries. “We use all natural ingredients, no preservatives,” Jacobson assures. “Flour, water, yeast, salt is the base of everything. Then whatever the filling is. Quality ingredients and the overnight rise make a huge difference. It just imparts more flavor to the bread.

A lot of places will mix their dough and then they’re baking it off within an hour or two. Ours allows the yeast to really work on the dough and develop the flavor.”

The bakery sells about 50 of each loaf weekly, but business soars when they set up at the Regional Market or the Clinton Square downtown farmers market. “In the summer, we send about 200 out to the market on Saturday,” Jacobson says. While asiago, gorgonzola and sundried tomato are top sellers, summer shoppers have their own favorite. “The olive seems to be the most popular when we do the market. That’s always the first one gone when we do the market. The rosemary and olive oil is my favorite, but it’s probably the one we sell the least of.”

But customers should know there’s no need to wait for the market. Any meal can be special with great stuffed bread.

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Movable yeast: Jennifer Jacobson, manager at Pasta’s Daily Bread, pulls two freshly baked loaves of kalamata olive bread from the bakery’s oven.