Focaccia, Pizza, and Calzone

Appears in
How to Bake
How to Bake

By Nick Malgieri

Published 1995

  • About
Focaccia, pizza, and calzone are among the most popular preparations made from yeast-risen dough.

Focaccia, Italian flatbread, is nothing more than flour, water, yeast, salt, and a little oil—added both for flavor and to make handling easy. Most focacce (the plural) are usually no more than an inch thick, and round or rectangular in shape. They are served as an accompaniment to a meal, or, especially the rectangle, split to make sandwiches.

Typically, a focaccia is baked with a topping, often just a drizzling of olive oil and a sprinkling of coarse salt. More elaborate toppings include fresh and/or dried herbs, sautéed onions, slivers of garlic, anchovies, cooked mushrooms, and even chopped tomatoes. Toppings are to flavor and enhance the focaccia and are never applied as generously as the toppings for a pizza. That is the principal difference between the two. Although a focaccia is usually thicker than a pizza, there are also thick-crusted pizzas.