Good morning, I'm Emanuela De Marchi, owner of the Marinetta bakery. We've been making focaccia since 1946. We're now in the city park of Villa Duchessa Di Galliera, the biggest
city park in Genoa, to tell you exactly how to make focaccia. The ingredients for focaccia are: flour, water, yeast, salt, lard, biga or first dough, malt extract to give color and crispness. The ingredients are added in the stand mixer with double arms and we're letting them be
worked for about 20 minutes. They are later removed
from the mixing machine and we're letting the dough
stand in a mass. After 30 to 45 minutes of rest, the dough is portioned.
It is divided into scaled pats that represent the right quantity of dough for each single tray. They're let to stand once more on a counter,
covered so the atmospheric agents are prevented
from damaging, they can't 'disturb' the rising. The pats for the biggest tray
should be more or less 900 gr. If you're trying to make it at home, obviously the trays will be certainly smaller, so the quantity of dough should be
measured according to the size of the tray. The next phase is the stretching, that is made in our laboratory rigorously by hand, with the rolling pin, a method that doesn't stress the dough and allows it to always keep its softness. Once it is stretched,
it's placed carefully in the tray, oiled previously
with olive oil, and then it is left to stand for 20 more minutes to half an hour. At this point, we have to give the dough a rectangular shape so it perfectly covers the whole tray. We're then moving on to the imprinting with the fingertips. We're giving it the
classic bumps that will later allow the creation of those cavities where the oil sets together
with water and salt. Those are the typical feature of Genoese focaccia. At the end of this step,
once more the dough is left to stand in the leavening closets for about an hour. The focaccia, at this point, is ready to be put in the oven. The dough is naturally blowing up, creating air bubbles, so the baker is making holes into this bubble
with a spike, making them deflate and thus keeping a certain size for the whole focaccia. The typical
Genoese focaccia has a variant, a quite peculiar declination that is the one with onions. We're using both the onion and the spring onion with a green long stalk. The white onion
is cut with a machine, but if we would cut the spring onion
with a machine, it would become a mush, so in the kitchen, while working and baking normal focaccia, we're preparing the ingredients for the onion topping. Of course, adding onion on a product
that is this thin and leavened is a risk, as you're taking the chance for the
rising to collapse and the focaccia to turn into a brick, so here the mastery
of the baker comes to play: he should be able to add a heavy
ingredient with a lot of gentleness, on a product that is leavening, that is rising. The focaccia shouldn't notice the addition of this intruder. Independently from the addition of onion or not, the focaccia has a very quick baking time: 6/7 minutes, as the temperature
of the ovens have to be quite high, since it has to bake on top and
on the bottom, but inside it must never lose the softness, as this must be the feature: soft inside, in the core, but crispy on top and crispy on the bottom.
Once it's out of the oven, it is let to cool down for a moment on the grids so it doesn't heat up and doesn't collect water vapor on the bottom. It is then brought to the counter to be sliced in the so-called, in Genoese, "slerfe" of focaccia. A tip: never ask for a hot focaccia
for take-away, if you need to put it in a bag: one of the worst enemies of the focaccia is the paper that hold all of the water vapor and makes it soaked, ruining the product. Our focaccia won
an award that makes us very proud, since a Genoese dialect poet,
Vito Elio Petrucci, dedicated a poem to our focaccia. Marinetta's focaccia trickles with oil, and happily creaks under the teeth, just as a leaf newly sprung.
There's Voltri, Genoa, Liguria and the world, and the desire for more of it. In the soft dimple, the grain of salt
is a pearl of the necklace. Thank you and see you soon!
