Cinnamon roll focaccia

a general guide to experimenting with focaccia flavors

How I Approach a New Flavor Every Week

Pretty early on in Scratch Made, I came up with the idea to offer a rotating focaccia—something new and eye catching each week to round out a meal. We’re always thinking about how to make our menu more useful and interesting. Since we don’t have a physical space where people can browse, our sides and add-ons function like the “impulse buys” at a cash register. That’s where the focaccia lives. That thing you didn’t know you needed, but suddenly have to try.

What started as a bit of a gimmick has become a real fixture. The entire menu changes every week and the focaccia is no different. It keeps things playful and adds a touch of surprise to the menu.

When I’m coming up with a new flavor, I usually draw from nostalgic dishes and familiar flavor combos—things like spinach artichoke dip, loaded baked potato, marinated olives, or ratatouille. I keep a running list of ideas on my phone, mostly savory, but with a number of sweet options too. I find that I actually get the most requests for sweet flavors on social media and they get consistently high orders on the menu.

Since I don’t have time to do test runs, I try to keep things as simple and low-risk as possible. If something flops, we’re stuck refunding customers and starting over. So, the stakes aren’t so high but…kind of. Luckily, focaccia dough is forgiving, so we’ve only had to do that once. After a few years of doing this, I’ve learned when and how to incorporate flavors without messing with the structure of the dough.

Sometimes that means folding ingredients directly into the dough—especially if they’d burn or lose their punch on top. I’ve found that you have to be heavy handed with the added ingredients in order for them to really come through. This happens because the ingredients lose volume as they bake while the surface area of the focaccia increases, so the flavors can easily become muted. Turmeric and melted leek, roasted honey nut squash, chopped olives, or lemon poppyseed are all great mixed in. Adding them this way can lend color, protect delicate ingredients, and deepen flavor.

For example:

Olives are delicious on top of focaccia but tend to burn or roll off when baked. Instead, I chop the olives finely and warm them with garlic, herbs, lemon peel, and olive oil—infusing both the olives and the oil. Then the olive mixture gets mixed into the dough and the oil gets drizzled on top. This approach also helps keep the cost down. With this flavor, I can usually expect to sell about 30 and to top that many, it would take a lot of olives for the flavor to really come through. This method creates way more flavor with far fewer olives.

With turmeric leek, the leeks burn too easily on top, but when mixed in, the flavor intensifies and the dough turns a vivid yellow.
For toppings like ratatouille or baked potato, though, the goal is caramelization and crispiness—so I layer them on top.

Savory flavors tend to work well with this approach. But sweet focaccia took some trial and error.

Sugar makes yeast rise faster, while too much cinnamon can keep it from rising at all. So when I started experimenting with sweet versions, I realized I had to wait until after the dough had proofed overnight to add those ingredients—minimizing their effect on the rise.

The first cinnamon roll focaccia I made tasted okay, but it lost the fluffy, airy bubbles I love and wasn’t quite sweet enough. I was worried about over-proofing and ended up under-proofing it instead, which can lead to a denser texture. When I revisited the idea recently, I finally got it right. It’s pillowy on the inside, crisp on the edges, and coated in caramelized sugar. I finished it with a light creamy glaze—sweet, but not over the top. I debated using cream cheese icing, but it felt too heavy and wouldn’t travel well. Instead, I used cream in the glaze to mimic that richness without the bulk.

The resulting focaccia was just sweet enough, with a texture that’s almost doughnut-like. I originally only made it simply to satisfy requests for a sweet focaccia, but now it’s one of my all-time favorites.

You have to try it! (And report back if you do!)

Cinnamon Roll Focaccia

Ingredients:

For the dough:

555 g water (room temperature)

750 g bread flour

7 g active dry yeast (or 4.8 g instant dry yeast)

10 g salt

90 g extra virgin olive oil

For the filling:

1/2 cup granulated sugar

2 Tbsp cinnamon

For the glaze:

2 cups powdered sugar

4-5 Tbsp heavy whipping cream or milk (or water works too!)

1 tsp cinnamon