Tomorrow is my one year anniversary at my current job, and to celebrate, and to thank my great co-workers for making it such a great year, I decided to make a special treat to bring in to work tomorrow. So what do I make for my treats? Bread of course!
The idea solidified when I was selecting the produce for our weekly delivery this week. I noticed they had concord grapes. I always meant to try making this recipe, and I thought, here is the perfect opportunity. Order placed, grapes arrived, home from work, kids in bed, time to bake!
To start, make my recipe for foccacia that you can find here:
http://moeknowsbread.blogspot.com/2011/09/pesto-bread.html
While the dough is rising, sterilize some tweezers and go to work seeding the grapes. And now, I will bestow upon you a great gift. All the concord grape recipes I read simply said to seed the grapes. What they didn't say was that the larger grapes have TWO seeds. In my case, this meant I spent 30 minutes seeding the grapes, and then 30 minutes re-seeding the grapes. Learn from my mistakes.
After the bread has risen, and hopefully more grapes have made it into the bowl than your mouth, shape the bread into foccacia and proceed on.
Once you've got the bread shaped and on the tray, make sure to press 15 dimples in each loaf. These will hold the majority of the grapes in place. The rest are on their own. Put a grape in each dimple, and then supplement with however many you want until they are basically covered.
Now, take some of your dried rosemary (you grow and dry your own, right?) and crush/sprinkle it over the loaves. Follow that with some Fleur de Sel that your mother in law brought you from France. Finally, cube butter into 1/4" cubes and drop about 8 cubes on each loaf. The butter will keep the tops of the loaves moist during the early stages of baking to promote a better rise, and will give the tops a beautiful golden brown color. Also, it's butter, do I really need to justify it?
Let the bread rise for 10 minutes more outside of the oven, and then bake one tray at a time at 375 and follow steps 17-20 on the linked foccacia post to bake. Total baking time is about 20-25 minutes.
Now, go throw on your best toga, lounge in your favorite chair, and eat some concord grape foccacia like it's 9. BC, that is.
A few key ingredients
Distribute the grapes, sprinkle with rosemary and salt
Add dots of butter
Perfection! Mangia!
