Instructions: I first taught myself how to make bread in the 70s from reading cook books - the usual white dough stuff. Have continued all these years, including over ten years using my DAK bread machine, one of the first to hit this country in the late 80s from Japan. Made literally hundreds of loaves of French-Italian type breads using the manual cycle and a cheap $4 Ecko (sp?) non-stick double bread pan (that finally gave out and started sticking after years of use). Now I am back to hand mixing and my method is as follows:

I mix up a sourdough starter (out of Bread Alone) with yeast and water, add some salt and a couple of cups of flour in one of those large (not the biggest) cheap stainless steel bowls that are everywhere (it is light and spins around easily on the counter, key components of my method), mixing with a wooden spoon. Then when the going gets a little heavy, I switch from spoon to one of those plastic kidney-shaped scrapers (think I got it in Lechters (sp?) for $1 with a hole in it.

Then gradually add the rest of the flour, scraping the outside of the dough against the side of the bowl with the curved scraper, spinning the bowl as necessary with my left hand, to keep the sides of the bowl clean and the dough worked; scrape, spin and flop the dough on top of itself. Remember this is a wet dough and I add only enough flour to give it some stability. When I am finished and the dough is very wet (my hands are clean, clean, maybe a little dough on my right thumb (this recipe is NOT for someone who loves getting into the dough) ) I pour perhaps a tablespoon of oil on top, then scrape and spin again to get the oil around the dough, messily flip it over with the scraper, put a lid or saran on the ss bowl, put in the refrig. Leave in for a day or two; then with the handy scraper, tilt bowl and scrape out the dough (it is wet and spongy) onto parchment.

The whole put-together dough and mixing method takes about 15 minutes, very streamlined; no counter clean-up and no messy hands and the focaccia comes out beautifully! I created this bowl method out of necessity; I have a tile-topped counter (not good for anything except looking at - never again), definitely not for any kind of dough preparation. All I end up cleaning is the bowl! One can use this method with any type of dough, requiring a little kneading. When I do a regular dough, I use the scraper as long as possible, then switch using my right hand to knead, and spin the bowl with the left. And the bowl is very easy to clean because it is continually scraped!

One more note: on a period show lately dating from the 1800s, I saw a "downstairs" cook kneading dough in a wooden shallow large box, similar to what we would know as a tray. Isnt that cleaver, if one is tight with space and has a tile-topped counter!?

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