Focaccia Romana from the Tomb Raider Cookbook

Focaccia Romana is an Italian fluffy bread topped with various ingredients, then baked to golden perfection and served with pasta or meat. The Tomb Raider Cookbook's recipe tops it with with flaky salt (I used sea salt), garlic, rosemary and plenty of olive oil, all of which soak into the bread's porous structure. I served it as a side to a main course of pasta Bolognese. I had made focaccia before, from a recipe that used store bought pizza dough, but for this recipe you make your own.

In the cookbook, the recipe is themed around the Colosseum level in Tomb Raider Chronicles, in which Lara searches for the Philosopher's Stone. This level sees her confront her rival treasure hunter Pierre DuPont, who she defeats in one of the most hilarious ways possible. ("Don't let me hold you up!") Perhaps she got the stone and then treated herself to some focaccia right after. I don't know, this is my headcanon for why these recipes were chosen in the cookbook's development.

I have a love-hate relationship with baking. It's a science, and you need to follow the recipe precisely to have the desired outcome. I've had issues with making bread or dough from scratch. Yeast often doesn't proof the way it's supposed to, either because it's too old or the water I added was too hot. This recipe uses active dry yeast, and I proofed it with sugar and "lukewarm" water (no temperature specified) for ten minutes. After ten minutes, there were some bubbles and it smelled like yeast, but it wasn't foamy the way it should have been.

I decided to carry on with the recipe after stirring the yeast in, causing it to foam a bit more. You leave it to rise for an hour, and then form it into a loaf and leave it for another 20 minutes. I put it into a bowl and the dough relaxed, but it didn't double in volume. My next mistake was stretching it out too wide, so it ended up rather flat. The recipe tells you to make it 8x14; I guesstimated and it came out big, partly because I wanted it to fit inside the baking sheet I was using.

After rising for 20 more minutes, you poke holes in the top and sprinkle your flavorings (rosemary, sea/flaky salt, garlic and olive oil) all over it, before it bakes for about the same amount of time. The result was effectively cooked pizza dough. It was cooked, but it didn't have the same fluffiness you'd expect from focaccia.

Since I cooked it toward the lower part of the oven, where the heat is, it didn't get very brown either. I could have baked it a little longer closer to the top, but at that point I wanted to be done. As I said, I served it with pasta, and the next night I served the rest of it with a steak salad.

The packet of yeast I used had a best before date of July 2026, and I made it in June, so it didn't have long left. I didn't take the temperature of the water for the dough, only guessing lukewarm when I poured it from the tap. It was cooked near the bottom and didn't get brown on top. These were all the mistakes I made when trying this recipe. Hopefully, if you make it, you'll learn from me.

If you want to make this recipe for Focaccia Romana yourself, you can find it in Tomb Raider: The Official Cookbook and Travel Guide.