BA's Shockingly Fabulous Focaccia Bread

I admit, I have never made any recipe with "yeast" due to sheer fear. This recipe crossed our eyes from Bon Appetit with one of our fave foodies, Samin Nosrat, and just sounded too good to be true. Should we dare? Beloved focaccia... so we hovered over my daughter while she attacked the seemingly daunting task. To our great delight, it was beyond simple to make and the end result was even better than we could have imagined. Better even than our new favorite down the street Italian cafe's focaccia bread . Now that's hard to beat! And it beat it indeed.

Here it goes...and it's an overnight process or at least 8 hours of resting:
In a large bowl, whisk together:
5 cups of all purpose white flour
5 tsp. salt, Diamond Crystal worked great. (can't scrimp on the salt, key flavour)

In 2.5 cups of lukewarm tap water, add 2- 1/4 tsp. active dry yeast and 2 tsp. honey. Mix this up and it turns cloudy. Leave it sit for about 5 minutes and some fermenting bubbles should form. If this doesn't happen, the yeast is probably not good. Add the yeasty water to the flour and mix with a spatula and/or your hands until a nice shaggy dough forms. (no dry streaks)

In another large bowl (as the dough will expand to double its girth) pour 4 tbsp. (or more, more is good) of extra virgin olive oil. It does matter that the oil you use is of great quality. It's incredible how much the oil perfumes the final product. Add the flour into this bowl and collect the dough with your hands, rolling it around in the oil while making a nice ball. Cover with saran and chill for at least 8 hours or overnight.

An alternate choice is to set the dough aside at room temperature to rise for 3-4 hours. We haven't tried this method yet, but we will!

After an overnight rise, the dough looks amazing, "alive", bubbly. Now it's time to stretch out the dough onto a large cookie sheet sized pan, or two for a more thin crusty bread. We loved the thick, light airy bread that is baked in 1 pan and we were blown away by the moistness once cooked. (We tried the 2 pan method to make a pizza thin bread, what a hit!)

Let the dough rest more once in the pan, at least an hour or so, it will still rise more. We left it a really long time before baking. Then, with all your fingers, strongly poke around the top of the dough, making small pools. On goes lots of olive oil, don't be shy.

Then comes the SECRET we only learned from Samin on the BA YouTube spot. Make a small glass of brine, 1/3 cup water and 1.5 tsp. salt, and pour straight onto the dough. It collects in the finger-made pools and then top with even more oil. WOW! Just doing it makes you feel like this bread will be special.

We topped our bread with lots of flaky sea salt and lots of dried rosemary.

In a 450F oven, the bread bakes for about 20-30 min. You want the underneath and crust to be nice and golden brown.

We were surprised at how fabulously this bread turned out. We keep making it!!