Focaccia Barese Farcita

Bari bakes its focaccia thick. Semola rimacinata and riced boiled potato are worked into a soft elastic dough, pressed into an oiled round tin, left to rise, then dimpled hard with the fingertips, studded with halved cherry tomatoes crushed cut-side-down into the holes, scattered with whole olives and oregano, drenched in olive oil, and baked until the rim goes deep gold and the tomato pools jammy in the dips. Eaten plain off the pan that is the finished thing. The farcita is what happens when a baker decides the round is a bread rather than a dish, takes a knife to it horizontally through the middle, and fills it, turning a street snack into a closed sandwich heavy enough to be a meal. Mortadella is the usual fill, sometimes capocollo or a few slices of provolone, sometimes nothing more than rocket and a wedge of fresh tomato.

It works as a sandwich because the bread was built to absorb before anyone thought of filling it. The potato in the dough gives the crumb a soft moist body that holds liquid without slumping, so even with a wet fill adding its own water the underside stays intact in the hand, where a leaner focaccia would go through. The oil and salt and oregano baked in mean the filling can stay restrained: a farcita wants no sauce, because the oregano and the collapsed cherry tomato already in the crumb supply the high notes, and a heavy hand with the meat only buries the bread that is the reason to eat it at all. The split is what binds it, pressing the soft cut interior against the filling so the two grip rather than slide.

The build fails where the bread fails. A focaccia made without enough potato bakes dense and dry and goes stale to leather within the hour, and a farcita on tired bread is a brick; the crumb has to be the soft potato kind that stays tender. Skip the crushing of the tomatoes and they sit on top dry and decorative instead of soaking flavour down into the crumb, and the bread loses its built-in seasoning. Pile in too much mortadella and the sandwich becomes a meat round that happens to have bread around it, the oregano and tomato lost. Fill it cold off a day-old base and the contrast dies; the version worth seeking is assembled while the round still holds the oven's warmth, so the mortadella goes soft and faintly sweating against the crumb.

Pull a wedge and the smell is oregano and warm olive oil over baked tomato, the mortadella's pistachio-and-pork richness rising as it warms. The crust along the rim is crisp and oil-fried where it met the tin, then the crumb gives soft and slightly damp, springy from the potato, the dimples where the tomato sat gone sweet and slick. The olive lands briny and the cherry tomato bursts in a jammy acid pocket against the salt of the cured meat. The oil coats the fingers and the paper sleeve darkens with it. It eats rich and soft and unmistakably Puglian, a sandwich that tastes first of its own oiled, oregano-flecked bread and only second of what was put inside.

In Bari you buy this by the slice, and the city argues over which oven does it best. Panificio Fiore, on Strada Palazzo di Città by the Basilica di San Nicola in the old town, has run since 1912 and draws a daily line for its ruota, the wheel of focaccia barese locals half-jokingly call blessed by the hand of the patron saint. The variations stay in the Puglian larder, each its own thing: the round filled with creamy stracciata or fresh fior di latte, best eaten within the hour; the one built on grilled zucchine and melanzane into a vegetable sandwich that still tastes of the oiled bread. The Ligurian coast bakes something called focaccia di Recco that shares only the word: two wafer sheets of unleavened dough pinched shut around soft cheese and blistered in a fierce oven, a cracker-thin cheese bake rather than a risen bread. The barese is its opposite, thick and leavened and potato-soft, studded with tomato and olive, split and filled.

The poor bread of Bari

The honest origin is a baking habit, not a creation, and it points to Altamura in the Murgia uplands behind Bari. There the round began as the poor relation of the region's famous durum-wheat bread: a flatbread cooked in the wood oven's fierce first heat, before or after the day's loaves went in, using the same dough enriched with potato and dressed with whatever was to hand. No baker owns it and no date opens its history; from that thrifty oven trick it became the snack of all Puglia, sold from early morning, eaten on the go at any hour.

The deeper genealogy is folklore and should be flagged as such. Bari likes to trace the focaccia to the Phoenicians, who are said to have kneaded millet, barley, water, and salt into oiled rounds cooked on hot stone, and to Cato the Elder, whose second-century-BCE De Agri Cultura records a puls punica, a Punic grain dish; these are evocative ancestors for an oiled flatbread but they are genealogy, not a documented line to the potato-dough round of modern Bari. The thing the record actually shows is humbler and later, a wood-oven street bread of the Murgia.

What is firm is the recipe that makes it barese rather than merely focaccia. To carry the name the dough takes semola rimacinata and boiled potato and stays relatively low, dressed with cherry tomatoes crushed into the surface, olives, oregano, and abundant oil, and baked, traditionally, in a wood-fired oven. The potato is the signature, the thing that gives the crumb its soft moist body and the reason the round survives being split and filled at all. That recipe travels with no seal: where the cheese focaccia of the Ligurian coast won an EU protected name and the durum bread of nearby Altamura holds a DOP, the focaccia barese is registered nowhere, defended only by the bakers who make it.