Baking - Supper

No-Knead Focaccia with Too Much Olive Oil

Delphine Roy — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

One 23 x 33 cm tray
50 min total — Serves 8 — Medium

Ingredients

For the dough

500 g strong bread flour
400 g cold water
10 g fine salt
4 g instant yeast
2 tbsp olive oil

For the pan and the top

5 tbsp olive oil, yes, five
200 g cherry tomatoes, halved
rosemary, picked into short sprigs
flaky salt

Focaccia is the most forgiving bread there is, and it is still the one people most often get wrong — because the two things that make it work both feel like mistakes while you are doing them.

The first is the water. At eighty per cent hydration this dough does not form a ball and cannot be kneaded. It is stirred, folded a few times, and then left in the fridge overnight, where time does the work that hands would otherwise have to.

The second is the oil. Four tablespoons in the tray is not a mistake and it is not a typo. It is a shallow fry, and it is the difference between a crisp, lacquered base and a flatbread.

What the overnight rise buys you

Cold fermentation slows the yeast down and lets enzymes get on with breaking starch into sugar. That sugar is what browns, and it is where the faintly sweet, almost nutty note in good focaccia comes from. A dough proved warm in three hours rises just as well and tastes of very little.

Eighteen hours is the outside edge. Past that the gluten starts giving up and the crumb goes gummy.

Dimpling, and why it has to be firm

Press with the pads of your fingers, straight down, until you feel the tray. Timid dimples close up in the oven and you get a dome. Real dimples hold oil, and the oil in them is what fries those pockets darker than the rest of the top.

Anything you push into those wells should be able to take twenty-five minutes at 230C. Halved tomatoes can. Sliced tomatoes cannot, and neither can garlic.

Eating it

Warm, torn, on its own. Or under the tomato salad, where it does the job bread was invented for.

Everyday Sourdough Without the Ceremony

Delphine Roy — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

One 900g loaf
1 hr 15 min total — Serves 12 — Project

Ingredients

100 g active starter, fed 6 hours earlier and risen
350 g water, at 28C
450 g strong white bread flour
50 g wholemeal flour
10 g fine salt
rice flour, for dusting

Sourdough acquired a culture of precision it does not need. Hydration to the gram, folds to the minute, temperature probes, spreadsheets. All of it is real and some of it matters at the margins, but none of it is the difference between good bread and bad bread at home.

The difference is three things: a starter that is actually active, a bulk fermentation judged by looking at the dough, and an oven hot enough.

An active starter

The single most common cause of a dense loaf is a starter used at the wrong moment. Fed and left, a starter rises, peaks, and falls; you want it on the way up or just at the peak, roughly four to eight hours after feeding depending on your kitchen. It should be domed, webbed with bubbles, and smell of yogurt rather than acetone.

If a spoonful floats in water, it is ready. If it sinks, feed it and wait.

Watch the dough, not the clock

Every published bulk time is wrong for your kitchen, because fermentation roughly doubles in speed for every 8C. Five hours at 22C might be three hours in August and seven in an unheated January kitchen. What does not change is what the dough looks like when it is ready: fifty per cent larger, domed rather than flat, wobbling as one mass, with visible bubbles around the rim of the bowl.

Under-fermented dough bakes tight and pale. Over-fermented dough spreads and tears. Both are visible before the loaf goes in the oven.

The fridge is a scheduling tool

A cold retard slows the yeast almost to a stop while the bacteria carry on producing acid, which is where the sour comes from. It also firms the dough up, which makes it far easier to turn into a screaming-hot pot without deflating.

And it means the loaf waits for you rather than the reverse. Shape at nine in the evening, bake whenever you like the next day.

Bake it dark

Twenty minutes with the lid on traps the loaf’s own steam, which keeps the crust soft so the bread can expand. Then the lid comes off and the crust dries, browns, and finally starts to blister. That last ten minutes — the part that looks like it might be going too far — is where the smell comes from. Take it out when it is the colour of an old penny, not before.

Buttermilk Scones for a Slow Morning

Delphine Roy — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

8 scones
28 min total — Serves 8 — Easy

Ingredients

350 g plain flour
2 tbsp caster sugar
1 tbsp baking powder
½ tsp bicarbonate of soda
¾ tsp fine salt
115 g butter, frozen solid
240 ml buttermilk, very cold
1 egg, beaten, to glaze

A scone is an argument about butter. Everything else on the list is a rounding error.

The goal is discrete pieces of solid butter still present in the dough when it enters the oven. In the heat, each one melts and its water content flashes to steam, pushing the surrounding dough apart and leaving a void. Hundreds of those voids read as flakiness and lift. Butter that has been warmed and rubbed into the flour, by contrast, coats the starch and gives you something short and sandy — pleasant, but a shortbread, not a scone.

Why grating works

Rubbing in by hand takes minutes, during which your hands are transferring heat. A frozen block on a box grater produces uniform shards in about twenty seconds, and the butter never softens. Toss them through with a fork and they stay separate.

Undermixed is correct

You are looking for a dough that still has dry flour in it when you stop stirring. Every extra turn of the knife develops gluten and, worse, smears the butter. The folding step then brings it together and builds layers at the same time — three letter folds is plenty, and each one should feel slightly less shaggy than the last.

If the dough looks smooth and elastic, it is already too late.

Cut, do not twist

A twisted cutter drags the edge of the dough round and pinches the layers closed. Straight down and straight up, with a floured cutter, leaves the sides open so the layers can climb.

Heat

220C, and get the oven there properly. Scones need the butter to melt and the steam to be generated faster than the structure sets; a moderate oven gives the butter time to leak out into the tray instead, and you get flat, greasy discs.