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I'm Shilpa Escovich. I'm in the BA test kitchen today and I'm here to show you the recipe for shockingly easy no need forkatcha developed by Sarah Jel. It is our most popular recipe of all time. It's really easy to understand why this recipe is so popular. One, it's fkatcha which is perhaps the most satisfying bread that you can ever make. And second, it is just so shockingly easy. Making this bread will make you seem like an expert at bread baking. Fkatcha is an yeasted bread and I have here in front of me active dry yeast. If you only have instant yeast, I would 100% use that. Yeast is what's responsible for making bread rise. I'm going to bloom it with warm water around 90ish°.
If the water is too hot, it will kill the yeast. When you're using active dry yeast, this is an important step. By adding the warm water, we're just waking them up and bringing them to life so they can strengthen and make our fkaca very big and bubbly. So now my yeast, I can tell, is bloomed because it's foamy on top, which is a reassuring sign that it is in fact alive and it will in fact leavenn my bread. I'm going to add a little bit of honey. Sometimes sugar is used and that is perfectly fine, but honey has its own flavor characteristics which I think are really nice in this bread. It provides a lot of energy to the yeast and it will also help the bread caramelize really nicely. I'm going to whisk just to
dissolve the honey into the yeast mixture before I move on to making the dough. In the bowl here, I have allpurpose flour. And I'm going to add my salt. A very essential part of bread making. It seasons your bread and makes it tasty. It also tightens up the structure of the dough. I'm going to dump in my bloomed yeast and honey mixture. I'm also going to add the rest of my water. There is a lot of water in this recipe. And when you mix it, it is not going to resemble a dough that you might be familiar with. It will be very wet. And that is a signature of no need bread. Gluten is formed when flour interacts with water. So by having a very wet dough, you can make a strong end result without much
kneading at all. As I'm mixing, what I'm paying attention to is just ensuring there aren't any large dry streaks of flour. This is what is called in bread making terms as a shaggy dough. You can see that there are no dry streaks of flour. There are no large clumps of flour and everything is moving as one nice mass, but it's far from smooth and that's okay. The important thing here is to make sure all of your flour is hydrated. And the good news about this fkaca is you're actually 90% of the way through to making your final bread. The hardest part of this recipe is actually done. And now I'm ready to transfer it into a bowl with some oil. I'm using olive oil to just grease the bowl. And
if you don't want to get your hands dirty, you can simply swirl the bowl to coat it in olive oil. And then I'm going to use my spatula to just dump this shaggy mass of dough into this oil bowl. You can see that it's laying on a pool of oil and the top surface doesn't have any oil. I'm simply going to turn this dough over so it's coated even on the top. Now I'm ready to cover the dough and let it rise. It's important to keep the dough covered as it's rising because you don't want the surface of the dough to dry out. You can use a lid or a plate or even a large rimmed baking sheet.
This is what we call in bread making the bulk fermentation stage. And the longer you can do your bulk fermentation, usually the tastier the end result is. I'm going to let this dough rise overnight in the fridge. If you're short on time, you can just rest it at room temp and let it rise. It will take maybe like 4 hours. However, I do highly recommend resting it overnight because I think it develops much better flavor that way. She has risen. Okay. Oh, wait. Do I do Am I talking to the camera right now? You can go ahead. Okay. You can see how it is increased in volume and you can see all of the bubbles forming around the edges. That's
the fun thing about using a glass bowl. You can see all of the action of the yeast. The next thing I'm going to do is perform a series of stretch and folds where you're stretching and you're folding the dough over itself. And every time I do that, I'm going to turn the dough quarter of the way. And then I'm going to repeat that motion. As you keep doing, the dough is going to get tighter and tighter. But those are all good things. You can see I'm using two forks. You really don't have to get your hands dirty at all. And right before we put it in the pan is when we perform this just to build a tiny bit of structure and help the fkaca rice upwards, not really outwards. So I have over here a 9x13.
You could use a bigger pan like a half sheet tray if you want to make a faukatcha that's larger but shallower. I'm using a 9 by13 because I want a nice big fluffy fkatcha. I am using softened butter. Then I'm going to use a pastry brush to brush the butter everywhere. It ensures your fkatcha doesn't stick. And the combination of the butter with the olive oil makes the bottom of your fkatcha particularly crispy. Now that the pan is greased, I'm going to transfer the dough into the pan. Ooh, that was a very satisfying loop. I am going to cover this right now because I'm getting it ready for its final proof. This is when it's going to build a lot of volume, trap a lot of air. Just
as with the bulk fermentation stage, it is important to cover the dough so it doesn't dry out. The dough has been rising for about half the time. I know it's going to need a little bit more time, but I'm going to go in at this stage and sort of help it along by stretching it so it reaches the edges. And this just sort of evens out the thickness. I'm going to cover this back up and let it continue to rise until it doubles in volume. Guys, just look at the dough. How good it looks. It's risen. It's filled the pan completely and it is extremely jiggly. This is extremely satisfying.
Um, okay. Just a few more seconds. Before you bake, lightly dimple the dough. You can see it's left an indentation that's slowly filling back up. That's the right stage to pop it in the oven. This looks perfect to me. So, I'm going to go ahead and do perhaps my most favorite part of the process, which is dimpling the dough. I'm going to grease my fingertips. There are a few important reasons why we're dimpling the dough. Like, doing so creates and controls the rise so it doesn't just blow up into one big mountain. Traditionally, in some parts of Italy, fkaca didn't always have salt in the dough itself. And these dimples formed little depressions for salted water that was poured on top and then it would be caught in these
pools and as it baked it would evaporate and that would be the seasoning for the dough. I make sure not to over dimple because then you're going to deflate all of that air that you built up in the dough. So, don't go too crazy. I'm going to drizzle it with olive oil on top. I know the recipe says to use like a tablespoon, but olive oil sometimes is like vanilla extract. You don't measure those things. Just go for it. Whatever your heart desires. I'm going to finish it with a little bit of flaky salt. I like to be generous. That's the best part when it falls into some of those dimples and it gets caught in a pool of oil. Now that it's all dimpled, oiled, salted, we're ready to bake this fkatcha. And it goes in at a
very high temperature because there is so much liquid in the dough. It's going to have this blast of heat and it's going to turn all of that water into steam and just blow out your faukatcha into a really big puffy thing. I know you guys can't smell it, which is unfortunate, but it smells extremely good in here. I'm going to remove it from the oven right now. Yum. Oh my god, look at this fkacatcha. I can hear some of that sizzling fat at the bottom. It's like crunchy and crispy. It's like nice bubbles and I'm very happy with it. I think this would be excellent eaten as it is, but I'm going to turn it up a
notch. So, I have four tablespoons, like a half stick of melted butter, and I'm just going to grate fresh garlic in here. I put the garlic in raw because I knew it was going to hit this hot bread and sort of gently cook. I love this recipe a lot. So, but perhaps more than the recipe itself, I think I love the recipe developer. This was developed by my former colleague Sarah Jel. I actually credit me being here in this kitchen to Sarah. She's the one who reached out to me. I started off as a freelancer and then I became a permanent part of this kitchen. So, shout out to Sarah Jel. She is the very best and her recipe is the undefeated queen of all the recipes that we ever put out at Bonav.
I'm going to pop this out onto the cutting board. And because of all the greasing, it is remarkably easy to get out of the pan. You see all of these bits where it touched the side of the pan and the heat really got to it. It's really nice and crispy and golden crunchy. You can see some of these microbubbles on the surface. That's a really good sign. That means this is a well fermented dough and there was a lot of air and volume trapped in and it's trapped forever more in this bread. I'm going to cut into this bread right away because I can't help myself. But if you were to eat it later, put a wire rack underneath so it doesn't steam between the surface and the bread and you lose all of those like crispy golden edges that you worked hard for.
Okay, here we have it. You can see this very plush and tender crumb in there. You can see some bubbles and then you can see the contrast between the crusty exterior and the fluffy inside. When you press down, the bread sort of just springs back and that's always a good sign. Look at this part that's saturated with the olive oil. I chose the corner piece because as with brownies, that is the best part. You have that nice crispy edge. Okay, let's bite into it. I feel like I don't even have to speak because you can hear that crunch. It's just something about bread. When it's homemade bread, it's even better. I mean, it's so easy to make. It feels like the best bread that ever possibly existed. While this bread is
fantastic just by itself, I am going to showcase how versatile it is by building a fabulous loaded sandwich with it. I'm going to slice this in half horizontally. We're going to treat it like you would a layer cake. I'm going to call this a vaguely Italian sandwich. It has pesto, Calabrian chili paste, which I'm actually going to dilute with olive oil, so it isn't that strong. Oh my god, this is like radioactive red, this Calabrian chili oil. And I'm going to use an offset to sort of spread this evenly. This is my most favorite tool in the kitchen. The open structure of a faukatcha makes it perfect for getting a bunch of like spreads and oils in there and they hide in all of those nooks and
crannies. And I know when we get a bite of that, it's going to be absolutely loaded with all of the flavors. I'm going to add some shhatella. Shutella is essentially like the inside of a ball of bara. That's all it is. I love shhatella in a faukaca. It's kind of like a glue that sort of holds all of the other elements together. Then I have mortadella. Oh my god, such a good sandwich meat. It's like fatty, salty, all of the things that are a good building block for a sandwich. When you add the mortadella, you sort of want to drape it and not just like shingle it in a single layer. It creates volume and air.
There's a very famous article by Helen Rosner which speaks about air being the most important ingredient in a good sandwich. There's some things that are like classics for a reason. None of these ingredients are unexpected, but they just work together like the green of the pesto, the pink mortadella, the calabrian chili oil. All of it is just so appetizing and enticing. Give it a shower of pistachios just to sort of pick up on the pistachios that are already in the mortadella and give it some texture and crunch. I always like to say texture is my favorite flavor. This is like one big plank and then you can cut it into pieces and portion it easily. Okay, this looks spectacular. You can see every single element and the ratio of
topping to bread is just so intense that it is like the best sandwich you've ever had. Look, I hope seeing this sandwich in all of its glory is reason enough to convince you to make this fkatcha our most popular recipe of all time for very good reason.
