Apr 20, 20207 min read

Tattie scones and focaccia!

Come for the recipe(s); stay for the story!

Video Tutorial: Here Scottish Tattie Scones (Adapted from BBC. Accidentally Americanized by me, see story below!)

1 lb mealy potatoes, cooked and then peeled (about 4 medium sized russets)

1/2 tsp salt

1/4 tsp pepper

2 oz butter (4 tbsp or 1/2 stick)

4 oz self-rising flour (or all purpose)

Butter for greasing skillet

1. Throw everything into a mixing bowl and mix until dough forms

2. Separate dough into two equal sized balls

3. Place one of dough balls onto a flat floured surface and then roll into a circle that is about 1/4-1/2" thick

4. Cut into 6 triangles

5. Repeat with second ball.

6. Place in a heated skilled that is greased with butter, and cook each side for 3-4 minutes until golden brown. For thicker scones, temperature may need to be lowered in order to ensure they are cooked through.

Yields 12 triangle scones.

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Focaccia

12 oz lukewarm water (1 1/2 cups) (think baby's bathwater for temperature)

1 tsp active dry yeast

pinch sugar

2.5 oz extra virgin olive oil, (1/2 cu)

2 tsp salt

1lb 3 oz flour-1 lb 8 oz bread flour (4-5 cups)

Herbs and spices for topping

More olive oil for pan and top of bread

1. Prepare your sheet pan by placing parchment (if using) and about 1 tbls of olive oil on it. Make sure olive oil is spread all over the pan.

2. Add yeast and sugar to water and let it set for about 5 minutes, until yeast is foamy.

3. Add oil to water/yeast mixture

4. Place salt and 1lb 3 oz flour in mixing bowl and then add liquid

5. Mix until dough comes together. It will be a little bit sticky, but it will also clearly be a dough. If it seems like it's somewhere between a loose dough and a super thick batter, add a little more flour.

6. Knead dough (on mixer or by hand) until you can thin a small bit of dough out enough to see the light through it before the dough breaks. (watch video tutorial or read this article if you have questions!)

7. Once the dough passes the "windowpane test" place it on your pan. Cover it with a towel and let it rest for about an hour, until it doubles in size.

8. Once it's doubled in size, spread it out so it reaches the edges of your sheet pan, and rub about 1 tbls of olive oil on the top so that it is covered.

9. Season with desired seasonings (I use salt, pepper, garlic, and fresh, chopped rosemary)

10. Let it rest for another 30-60 minutes or so. It will grow again. I didn't let mine grow too much but you can let it go until it doubles in size again if you would like.

11. Bake at 425 for about 25 minutes. Rotating it half way through the bake time so that it bakes evenly. It should be golden brown completely before removing.

12. Eat and Enjoy!

So this was an adventure! Also, learning to make bread was an adventure in the beginning. Most of my bread adventures as a kid involved a bread machine that you just threw everything in at lunch time, and by dinner time the house smelled heavenly, and you knew the delicious treat was to come. (Slathered in butter of course!) My Mom really liked sourdough bread so she used to buy the sourdough mixes alot; I didn't like them at the time so that was always a disappointment to smell the loveliness knowing that you weren't going to like the outcome. (My Mom may have made cake and bread from a box, but that woman is a Jill of all trades. We had delicious homemade dinners every night, she is the craftiest person you'll ever meet, and she still found time to homeschool three children AND have a job!)

On the off chance that we did use yeast for something other than the bread machine, her warnings that the water had to be the right temperature in order for the yeast to work always scared me, "You don't want to kill it!" The thought of killing the yeast followed me into adulthood and I tended to steer away from anything that involved yeast because of that fear, until pastry school. We had a couple of bread days where we learned cinnamon rolls, baquette, focaccia, ciabatta, and a few other things, and I still wasn't convinced that making it at home was worth it. There's a panera 15 minutes from everyone's house or job, am I right?

I started my first pastry job, and found out quickly they made nearly everything from scratch, including several different ice creams, sorbets, and breads (Vegan ones too!) Almost as soon as my internship there was completed, they added on a new variety of bread, and not long after that addition our pastry chef put his two weeks notice in. So we were left with a pastry department of me, myself, and I, and way more bread than I ever thought I wanted to make. The list included: Vegan hamburger rolls, sub rolls for chicken salad and oyster po' boys (Maryland loves seafood!), challah for french toast, bagels for brunch, focaccia for turkey sandwiches and lunchtime bread service, and the newly added milk bread for dinner service and slider buns. Many restaurants don't have bread service, much less all of these varieties of bread. (This list doesn't include the EIGHT HUNDRED biscuits we made a week for brunch bread service, I was an incredibly busy lady!)

I didn't realize how much I loved making bread until I started my current job, where we buy 99% of the bread from a local bakery. I am privileged to still get to make lavash once a week. Bread is a process that requires you to have patience. Yes, I know, Amanda and patience don't usually coexist, but bread requires patience in different ways from other pastries. Bread likes to be mixed, then left alone, kneaded, and left alone again, before finally being baked. The patience comes when I am allowed to walk away and multitask doing other things. It requires patience without also being "kneady." (Yay pastry puns!)

When we finished cake week, I was sad because I LOVE cake, but when I realized week two was bread week I was so excited because I miss bread as much as I love cake! The first challenge, which we tackle this week, is flatbreads. The contestants had to make one unleavened flatbread, and one with leavener in it. So we are making Scottish Tattie Scones (which I had never heard of and only discovered because of this show) and focaccia which I made daily, sometimes twice daily, for over two years. (Hello old friend!) The scones were interesting because I had no idea what to expect. I looked at several recipes and found that the ingredients where essentially the same across the board. (Some used self-rising flour and some used all purpose.) Some recipes had baking powder in them, but through reading I realized that it's not really an ingredient that does anything. The dough is far too heavy for the baking powder to do its job. So I opted for the BBC recipe above that had self-rising flour. (Again, the leavener doesn't really do anything so all purpose flour would work the same.) In many of the recipes I read that the potatoes were boiled. Some sources said that if you cooked them in the skin, you would get a more prominent potato taste which I am all about, so I was definitely going to do that! Somewhere else I read that the potatoes should be dry, this is where my accidental Americanization of the recipe began. I thought, dry? I'll bake them, in the skin of course for the extra potato flavor! I baked them at 400F until a fork poked in them easily, let them cool to room temperature, and then threw all the ingredients into the mixer and let it go until a dough formed. I thought they were fantastic! So I decided to do the video tutorial. After the fact, I decided to just look for other tutorials on YouTube, and I discovered my error. Surely, I wasn't the only one who baked the potatoes instead of boiled them, right?!? WRONG! I went back to all the recipes I found earlier and every..single..one of them mentioned boiling. All of the videos I saw on YouTube? BOILED. Well. Here I am, this is my recipe and I'm sticking to it, and I apologize to any Scots who may be offended by my blasphemy, but recipes are always evolving, right? Try it boiled or baked and let me know what you think! Also note, traditionally they are mashed before you add everything to them, which gives you more of a smooth dough than you would get with my recipe, and lastly, you would use warm potatoes, not cold or room temperature.

Focaccia I was obviously familiar with. The recipe they gave us in school was for baguette that was baked like focaccia (water, flour, yeast, salt) but focaccia traditionally has olive oil in it. So I modified it based on other recipes I had seen, and what I could remember from the restaurant focaccia recipe that I had memorized once upon a time. There was no "uh-oh" moment with this one so a little bit of the history instead.

Focaccia is from Italy, and there are several different variations based on which part of the country you are in, including one that is covered in cheese! (Why, didn't I make this one?!?!?) One thing I learned, that wasn't at all surprising is that typically focaccia in Italy is thinner than it is here (makes more sense why it would be considered a "flat" bread). Focaccia we made at the restaurant was usually about an 1"-1.25" thick. This one I made at home only ended up being about half an inch thick. So definitely a little more traditional.

I couldn't find the exact time when focaccia first was made in Italy, but it's safe to say they have been making flatbread for thousands of years. "Eerily preserved sliced flatbread found caked in ash in Pompeii is proof that bakers were at work on the very morning Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D." We do know that focaccia was originally made without yeast and would naturally rise in the right climate which has led many to believe that it was first made in mountainous regions near the Mediterranean Sea. I'm not sure I care so much about who first made it, as long as I get to eat it!