It also helps that they are delicious. This rendition of flatbread topped with onions might be considered a homemade version of focaccia cipolla ligure, although I think it's closer to a French pissaladiere, but without anchovies or olives. Personally, I like olives a lot, and I'm an enormous fan of anchovies (brine-cured over a kilo of them last summer and am still using them!), but Adri doesn't share these passions, so when I'm cooking for the two of us I leave the stinkers out.
This is a really laid-back process that I like to stretch over a lazy late-morning-to-early-afternoon. Onions—red, white, or yellow—sliced (I use a Benriner mandoline) and sautéed in a small amount of olive oil over low heat until they are quite soft and lost a fair bit of their moisture. While the onions are cooking, they can be seasoned with pretty much whatever I feel like—quatre epices, paprika, salt, etc.—and after they're cooked I can forget about them until the afternoon when I prepare the bread for the oven.
Then I make the dough. About a cup and a half of very warm water is good to proof about a teaspoon and a half of yeast, and this gets added to about two cups of soft wheat flour (see my gripe below) and a teaspoon of sea salt. Mixing this all up thoroughly yields a floppy dough, which I then just gather into a ball and leave in the mixing bowl, coated with more olive oil and covered with a dampened kitchen towel. Then I forget about it for a couple of hours, maybe more.
About a half-hour before snack time, I turn the oven on to 400°F, and oil up (yes, more oil, because focaccia is oily!) my number 12 cast-iron skillet. The dough at this point is very flimsy because of all the air that it contains, and I just flop it from the mixing bowl directly into the oiled skillet and spread it around to an even thickness—no kneading needed because there's little gluten to develop. Only thing left to do is to strew the onions across the dough, and then it's just baking and eating.
I find it weird that focaccia—which I consider in the "breads" category—is best made with low-gluten "soft" flour—which I normally associate with cakes. I have made focaccia with regular all-purpose flour, and interestingly the end result is "odd" because of the softness of the texture, as compared with the desired coarse crumb I get with soft flour. I think it has to do with the interaction between the flour and the oil, but I'm not sure.
Now an ingredient as basic as flour should be pretty much a no-brainer, but in the U.S. it's not all that easy to get flours for specific purposes. Anyone growing up here would think that there are only two kinds of flour—"whole wheat" for the hippies and "all-purpose" for the rest of us. While it may be true that whole wheat flour really is just for hippies, the homogenization of the true diversity of all the other flours into a one-size-fits-all "all-purpose" really, really sucks. Sometimes you want a flour with a higher protein content, and sometimes you need a softer flour. All-purpose flour is okay for a lot of things, but being made from a blend of hard and soft wheat, it's definitely suboptimal for things that "prefer" to be made from either hard or soft flour, such as noodles, bread, pizza, focaccia, and cake.
Go to an Italian recipe site, and look for a recipe for focaccia. I'll bet that the recipe calls for "farina 00 di grano tenero"—flour made from soft wheat. Now in Italy, you can go to the store and select from flours that are harder, softer, or in between, but in the States we don't have this luxury. Some corporate bigwig—call him "the Man"—has decided that such decisions are best left to the professionals, and the average consumer will have only all-purpose to use. Well I for one say, "Screw the Man and his demeaning attitude towards home cooks"! We should have flour choices for our breads and our cakes, just as our colleagues across the Atlantic have!
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