Focaccia

Genoese focaccia, fugassa in dialect, is a leavened bread baked flat in an oiled tray, roughly one to two centimetres high. Its signature is the dimples: fingertips pressed into the risen dough, each hollow filling with a brine of water, salt and extra virgin olive oil. The water evaporates in the oven, the oil stays, and the top comes out glossy and lightly salted.

Three things share the name and almost nothing else. Focaccia di Recco col formaggio has no yeast at all: two paper-thin sheets of dough with fresh stracchino between them, blasted in a very hot oven, and it is the only one of the family with a protected IGP status. Focaccia di Voltri is thinner and drier, with deeper dimples, baked in the wood ovens of western Genoa. Focaccia barese, from Puglia, has boiled potato in the dough and cherry tomatoes on top.

Salty, olive-forward and soft, with a thin crisp base and a crumb that is moist rather than fluffy. The salt arrives in crystals rather than evenly, so bites alternate between plain bread and sharp seasoning. Good focaccia leaves a clean olive oil finish, not a greasy coating.

What surprises most Americans and Britons is what is missing. There is no rosemary in a classic fugassa, no garlic, no herb crust, no sweetness. Supermarket focaccia abroad is usually taller, drier and heavily herbed: closer to a seasoned dinner roll than to the Ligurian original.

Focaccia di Recco tastes almost nothing like it: shattering thin pastry, blistered and slightly burnt in spots, with molten fresh cheese that is milky and faintly sour.

Eat it the day it is baked, warm or at room temperature. In Genoa it is breakfast, dipped into a cappuccino, an entirely ordinary local habit and not a tourist stunt.

To revive day-old focaccia, three to five minutes in a 200 °C oven brings it back. Never use a microwave: it turns rubbery in seconds. To freeze, cut it into portions first, then reheat straight from frozen.

Split it horizontally for sandwiches with prosciutto, mortadella or fresh cheese. Skip the pesto: warm basil turns bitter, and no Genoese bakery serves focaccia that way. Focaccia di Recco is never filled and never reheated: it is eaten within minutes of leaving the oven.

A wrapped industrial focaccia carries a date on the pack, set by the producer, and that pack is the reference for anything sold sealed. Bakery focaccia is made to be eaten the day it comes out of the oven, and after that it changes in a predictable way. Left in paper at room temperature it stays soft for roughly a day, because the oil in the crumb slows moisture loss. By the second day the starch retrogrades: the crumb tightens, the oiled top goes leathery, and the salt draws a little damp to the surface.

The fridge is the fastest route to a hard focaccia, since staling runs quickest at around 4 C. Room temperature in paper, never a sealed plastic bag, keeps the crust from going soggy. For anything beyond a day the freezer is the usual answer: cut it into portions, wrap them tightly, and reheat straight from frozen at 200 C. Past a month or two at minus 18 C the olive oil slowly oxidises and the flavour flattens toward cardboard.

Genoese focaccia looks wet before it looks golden. The surface is glossy with oil pooled in the dimples, salt crystals still visible on top, the slab two to three centimetres high, the underside pale and faintly fried from the oiled tray. On a wrapped pack, read the ingredients: flour, water, extra virgin olive oil, salt, yeast and malt. Sunflower oil, palm fat or a long line of emulsifiers points to a soft sandwich bread shaped like focaccia.

Two things get confused with it abroad. The tall herb-flecked slabs sold as focaccia in supermarket bakery sections run four to six centimetres high and crumble instead of folding. Roman pizza bianca is thinner and crisper and carries no brine. Focaccia di Recco is a separate product with no dimples and no yeast: two almost transparent sheets of dough with pockets of cheese between them, blistered dark in patches. The price tells you which counter you are at, since focaccia sold by weight from a bakery costs more than a wrapped supermarket pack.

In the US, Italian bakeries in the north-east and the Bay Area sell focaccia by weight, typically 10 to 16 dollars per pound; Eataly bakes it daily in its bread counters. In the UK, look to Italian delis and specialist bakeries rather than supermarkets, at roughly 10 to 18 pounds per kilo.

Read the label before buying industrial focaccia: seed oil or palm fat instead of extra virgin olive oil is the reliable sign of a bread pretending to be focaccia. Height is the other tell: anything above three centimetres is a different product.

Focaccia di Recco does not travel. A few Ligurian producers ship it frozen for home baking; everything else sold under that name outside Liguria is an imitation, and legally cannot use the IGP name.

Genoa is the place: the bakeries in the caruggi, the arcades of Sottoripa near the old port, and the streets around the Mercato Orientale, where focaccia is sold by weight from early morning. Go to Voltri, in the western suburbs, for the thinner wood-fired version.

For focaccia col formaggio, drive twenty minutes east along the Golfo Paradiso to Recco, Camogli, Sori or Avegno, the four towns of the IGP. Recco holds a festival for it in late May, with trays coming out of the ovens all day.

Anywhere on the Ligurian coast, the rule is simple: buy it from a bakery that sells it by weight, not from a place with photographs on the menu.