Focaccia: King Arthur's Recipe of the Year
Will this be my new go-to focaccia recipe? Yes, I think so!
King Arthur Baking is a fantastic source for recipes. There's plenty to like about the company overall: they make great flour, they have a free baking hotline staffed with professional bakers, they've been employee-owned since 2004, they're a B Corp. But above all, it's their recipes that I love. I find them to be reliable, and a reliable recipe source is a treasure in these days of content slop. They may not all be showstopper recipes, but I can count on them to work.
At the start of every year, they announce their Recipe of the Year, a recipe they're particularly excited about. Last year's was a real mixed bag, it was an overly-fussy chocolate chip cookie. I made it, and it turned out, and at first I loved it, but it wasn't so good that it made up for the extra steps in the recipe. And the recipe the year before that left me cold. It was coffee cake, but they didn't select one standout recipe that they truly believed in. Instead, they released a collection of a dozen or so coffee cake flavors; it felt like a cop out. But! Back in 2021 they had a true game-changer of a recipe, their Perfectly Pillowy Cinnamon Rolls. Those cinnamon rolls are amazing, so amazing that I still hold out hope that a Recipe of the Year will live up to the hype like that one did.
Today I got around to trying the 2025 Recipe of the Year: Big and Bubbly Focaccia. I've baked several different focaccia recipes* over the years, looking for the one that would become my go-to. They've all been okay, but they haven't felt like the one.
This new recipe has the potential to become my go-to. Time will tell, but I suspect this is the one I'll reach for the next time I want focaccia. I like that it's tall and light, and I like that they manage to get the edges all crispy.
Beginners will have a good time with this recipe, I think. They've kept it simple. The mixing and folds are all done in the same bowl. The folds that are done are pretty easy. There isn't an overnight preferment step, so you can have it the same day you decide to make it. But if you want to break up the steps, it has instructions for tossing it into the fridge at night and finishing it the next day. And the dimpling at the end is always fun.
They are using this new recipe to push their own $55 "focaccia" pan, which is where King Arthur Baking honestly has gotten a bit silly. They keep coming out with Williams-Sonoma-style products that are not really necessary. No one needs a dedicated focaccia pan. (I used a cast iron skillet.) Their catalog has exploded with mixes and ingredients and tools that are meant for people with more dollars than sense. I worry that they might overinvest in silly products and wind up with too much weird merch they can't move. But if that's what's successfully keeping the lights on over there, then I'll just shrug, keep on buying their flour, and keep baking their recipes.
A tip for not getting lost when you're following a long recipe with repetitive steps like this one (i.e., keeping track of which fold you're on): grab a little post-it flag to mark exactly where you are, and move it as you go. Mmm, accomplishy!
I made this focaccia to go with a "pesto beans" recipe from the New York Times (it's the recipe I mentioned earlier this week). Meh. It wasn't bad, but it didn't really have pesto flavor, and it was kinda bland. It was a sort of deconstructed pesto. It would have been much easier and almost certainly tastier to just mix up some beans with some actual pesto. (Also: the prep time given on the recipe was 10 minutes, but it easily took three or four times that long, and that was with a mandoline. As Rich said, "a professional sous chef could maybe do it in 10 minutes, if they were in some kind of speed competition." See, that's what I was talking about the other day! Time estimates are lies!)
The focaccia saved the meal! And Wanda ate three pieces of it, that's always a good sign. I'll be making this one again.
* There is one oddball focaccia recipe I adore and keep returning to, but it doesn't count: it's King Arthur's Double Chocolate Focaccia recipe. It's similar to this one in form, it's a nice, tall, bubbly focaccia. But it's made with black cocoa! It's so weird. It looks like cake, but it tastes like bread... only with cocoa. It's not very sweet at all. No one was asking for this thing to exist, I don't know what compelled them to make it. But damn. It's good. I eat it with mascarpone and tart cherry jam. It's addictive.
