Last weekend, I tried making focaccia for the first time. I tried two recipes at once, the one from The Bread Baker's Apprentice and a traditional Genovese focaccia recipe modified for quick-rise (I got this one from a FOAF).
For both, I tried to massage the olive oil (in the BBA case infused with dried herbs) into the dough before the proofing (that's a word at least one of the recipes said, "massage"). In fact, the oil just sloshed around on the surface, puddled in the dimples, and flowed off the bread into the pan. The time spent proofing and baking was enough for the oil to flow completely off the surface. In both cases, I ended up with a loaf with dry upper crust and greasy soaked lower half.
What was my mistake? How should I have worked the oil into/onto the bread to get a nice result?
Best Answer
In the real "focaccia genovese" oil is mixed in the dough and added on top of the focaccia.
It is a tricky procedure, there is a video and photo sequence here; unfortunately is in Italian, but you can easily translate it with Google and video and images could help anyway.
I did many times focaccia using this recipe and it's the closest thing to real focaccia genovese I can get