Grilled Focaccia

Saturday, July 29, 2006
I don't even want to count how many days we are into this heat wave, but it was definitely too hot to turn on the oven; hence, the grilled focaccia. Even though I didn't use the oven, making it was not exactly like sitting by a pool drinking an iced gin and tonic. I still had to put the bread in a 500-degree Weber and take the bread off the baking pan and put it next to a bank of white-hot coals. But taking it back into the air conditioned dining room and eating it was easily the most satisfying thing I'd done all day. (Well, not much of a contest since the other things I did today were buy a tree, do some laundry, and read 150 pages of the transcript of a trial in which my unfortunate client was being pursued by a deputy sheriff while he (the client) was captured on videotape throwing baggies out the window of his truck. By a weird coincidence, the sheriff found some baggies containing methamphetamine by the side of the same road).
This bread was actually one of the most attractive breads I've ever made. Unfortunately, we forgot to take pictures of it when it was fresh off the grill looking browned and crisp and quite glorious, and before I hacked it into pieces. But even the hacked-up pieces look pretty good. We had chicken and a mix of what was left of last Sunday's Farmers Market vegetables, and a cruet of olive oil for the bread, and some crisp white wine. Not a bad way to end the day.