Wholemeal Focaccia

Plain flour (type 1) is your backbone — it's the one flour here with enough gluten to actually hold the loaf up. If you can't get "type 1" specifically, any strong white bread flour does the same job; it's about protein content, not the number on the bag. Wholemeal flour brings bran and germ back in — more flavour, more fibre, but bran edges cut gluten strands as the dough stretches, which is part of why this loaf is denser than a plain white one, and why you want those folds doing structural work the flour can't do alone. Red rice flour is the flourish: a nutty, slightly sweet, faintly pink note, and because rice has no gluten, it's the flour that softens the whole crumb. No red rice flour at home? Any rice flour will do a version of the same job, just without the colour and the particular toastiness — don't go reaching for cornflour, it behaves nothing like it in a dough.

Water at 240 ml plus the 30 ml for the topping is deliberately generous. A focaccia dough should feel more like a thick batter than bread dough — if yours feels kneadable like pizza dough, it's too dry and will bake tight rather than open. Trust the stickiness; it loosens with every fold.

Yeast at 3 g for 350 g of flour is a slow, small amount on purpose — this is a long, cool rise recipe, not a fast one. Small yeast quantities give the dough time to develop flavour through fermentation rather than just filling with gas quickly. If you only have dried active yeast rather than instant, dissolve it in a little of the water first; if you've only got fresh yeast, use roughly three times the weight.

Salt at 4 g in the dough is low — focaccia gets its second hit of salt on top, in the water-oil mixture, and that's the one you taste first when you bite in. Don't add it all at once at the start either way: salt tightens gluten structure, so dumping it in before the flours have hydrated properly makes early kneading harder than it needs to be.

Durum flour for dusting is there because its coarser, harder grain doesn't absorb into a wet dough as fast as a soft flour would — it sits on the surface and does its job of stopping stick, rather than becoming part of the dough and changing its hydration. Any coarse semolina-style flour substitutes fine; ordinary plain flour works in a pinch but go easy, it does get absorbed faster.

Olive oil — 30 ml over the top, plus whatever you use to oil the tin — is non-negotiable for flavour here, it's doing something a neutral oil can't: carrying its own fruitiness into the crust as it fries slightly in contact with the hot tin. If you want a substitution, pick any oil that can take 240°C without smoking and has enough character to be noticed — but understand you're trading away the actual point of the olive oil, not just its name.

On a British fan oven, 240°C is genuinely hot — hotter than most people run their oven for anything short of a pizza stone session. That heat is what gives you the crisp, slightly blistered top in under twenty minutes; anything cooler and the crust sets before it browns, leaving you with a pale, soft top instead of the contrast you want. Go by colour and the faint crackle sound when you tap it, not by the clock — ovens lie, colour doesn't. A 30x40 cm tin is a fairly standard roasting-tin size in most UK kitchens, so you likely already own the right vessel; if yours runs smaller, spread the dough thinner rather than piling it deeper, or the middle won't catch up with the edges in time.