Pesto Focaccia

Strong white flour (360g) is non-negotiable here, not snobbery — "strong" means more protein, which means more gluten, which means the dough can actually hold the gas from three long rises without tearing into a flat puddle. Plain flour will rise once, gamely, then give up by fold two. If you've only got plain flour in the cupboard, you're better off reaching for bread flour at the shop than pushing on — this dough asks a lot of its gluten.

The yeast (4g, crumbled) is doing a slow job across roughly two and a half hours of resting, not a fast one. That's why it's crumbled in cold, not dissolved in warm water, and why there's no rush to "activate" it with heat — at room temperature it works steadily, and steady is what gives you the big irregular bubbles rather than the tight, even crumb you'd get from forcing a fast rise with extra heat. Patience is genuinely the main ingredient in this list; everything else just flavours what the time builds.

Salt appears twice for different reasons. The 6g in the dough controls the yeast's pace and firms the gluten network — too much salt too early and you slow the yeast right down, which is why it goes in with, not before, the bulk of the liquid. The 2-3g in the water-and-oil mixture poured over the top near the end is seasoning for the crust itself, since the inside of the dough never really tastes the outside unless you salt the surface directly.

Pine nuts (8g) and pesto (40g) are mixed straight into the dough rather than scattered on top, which tells you something: this isn't a focaccia that's decorated, it's one that's flavoured all the way through, closer to a herb bread than a plain base with pesto smeared on at the end. The pesto gets thinned with water before going in — pesto on its own is too oily and too thick to distribute evenly through a wet dough; thinning it lets it marble through properly instead of sitting in oily streaks.

Olive oil shows up three times and each has its own job — greasing the bowl (stops the dough sticking as it rises, not flavour), greasing the tray (so the base fries slightly against the hot metal rather than steaming and going soft), and in the water mixture poured over before baking (this is what gives focaccia its characteristic dimpled, slightly crisp top — without it you get a dry crust instead of that glossy, salty skin). Use any oil with no smell of its own if you must substitute for the tray — a neutral oil won't hurt the texture — but for the topping and dough itself, you want an olive oil you'd actually taste, because here it's not just lubrication, it's flavour.

Semolina or rice flour under the dough before it goes in the tray is there to stop sticking without working more flour into the dough itself — plain flour would do the same job but risks getting kneaded back in as you handle the dough, toughening the parts it touches. Semolina stays put as a dusting and gives a little extra crunch on the base, which is a nice bonus rather than the point.

The toppings — soft cheese, bacon, pumpkin cream — go on after the first bake, not before, because the dough needs its own dry heat to set and rise properly; wet toppings on raw dough would stop the base ever crisping and you'd get a soggy middle under a nice crust. Soft cheese melts in a few minutes at the same high heat; bacon and pumpkin cream need less time still, since you're warming and glazing them rather than cooking them from raw — bacon this thin will crisp quickly on its own, and pumpkin cream just needs to heat through and not go dry.