Italian breads seem specifically designed to complement a rich pesto or tomato sauce and become the perfect sneaky snack food.
Of these ‘snack breads’, my favourite is, hands down, the focaccia: golden, soft and fluffy, it is delicious by itself but really comes to life when accompanied by the right sauce… Needless to say, I am capable of eating it non-stop before, during and after a meal, even when I’m supposedly full!
Now, making it gluten-free has been a challenge: in our first trials it always came out too dry and ‘sandy’, or soggy, undercooked in places and mostly self-disintegrating…
I made it about 3 times in one week!, but to veganize it I decided to replace the eggs with chickpea flour, and the result was a delicious gluten-free focaccia with a cauliflower crust that is crispy on the outside while soft on the inside.
I called it a focaccia for lack of a better word: of course it is gluten-free and made with chickpea flour so it will not have the same consistency as real focaccia, but the taste and the pesto-compatibility are fantastic!
I feel that this focaccia is absolutely perfect for brunch: it’s seriously indulgent, but you can decide how rich you want the meal to be by playing around with the topping… In our case, I balanced the homemade pesto sauces (‘classic’ basil pesto and roasted cherry tomatoes pesto) with a healthy mix of raw spinach, courgettes and multicoloured carrots: I have to admit that even after I ate it all up and was completely full, I still felt like reaching for another slice… What do you think, mission accomplished?
Chickpea flour, 100g
Water, 200ml
Cauliflower, 1 small (or ½ big)
Olive oil, 2 tbsp
Salt, 1 tsp
Pepper
Optional: your favourite spices. I think this focaccia begs for rosemary or oregano, but it’s absolutely not mandatory!
Fresh basil, 90g
Pine nuts, 60g
Cashew nuts, 50g
Olive oil, 1 tbsp
Water, 1 cup
Salt, 1.5 tsp
Roasted garlic, 1 clove
The red pesto:
Cherry tomatoes, 350g
Pine nuts, 30g
Cashew nuts, 40g
Roasted garlic, 1 clove
Salt, 1 tsp
Raw cane sugar, 1 tsp
Pepper, a pinch
Olive oil, 2 tsp
Preheat the oven at 200C, as you’ll need it throughout the recipe
Mix the chickpea flour with the water and 2 tbsp of oil, then whisk thoroughly to break up any clumps. Let the batter sit for 15 minutes. In the meantime, coat the inside of an oven-proof pan with an additional tbsp of oil.
Chop up the cauliflower, then blend/process it into granules.
Add the cauliflower to the focaccia batter, then pour it into the oiled pan.
Bake it in the oven for 40-45 minutes (if your oven is uneven like ours, you may have to rotate it halfway through to ensure that it cooks uniformly).
Chop the tomatoes, coat them with the salt, sugar, pepper and oil and roast them in the oven for about 30 minutes (you want the sugar to caramelize the skin, but not to burn). Place the garlic in the oven at the same time.
Once the tomatoes are ready, blend them with the remaining ingredients. Adjust the texture with water or additional pine nuts as you wish (it also depends on the water content of the tomatoes so YMMV).
Blend all the ingredients together, taking care to add the water last, a bit at a time, just to facilitate the process: you don’t want to lose too much taste!
