Some recipes are written down. The good ones are remembered with the hands. Mamma’s focaccia
was never on a card in a drawer — it lived in the way she pressed her fingers into the dough, in the smell
that pulled the whole family into the kitchen on a Sunday morning. This is the story of how that focaccia
travelled from a small town tucked into the hills of Southern Italy all the way to a corner of the North
Trail in Sarasota — and why it still tastes like home.

A town of warm water and warmer kitchens: Contursi Terme

Our story begins in Contursi Terme, a little town in the province of Salerno, where the
Campania hills roll down toward the edge of the Cilento. People know Contursi for its thermal springs — warm
water that has bubbled up from the earth for as long as anyone can remember. But ask anyone from there what
they really miss, and they won’t tell you about the baths. They’ll tell you about the bread.

In a town like that, a kitchen is never empty and never quiet. Doors stay open. Neighbours wander in.
There is always a pot going, always someone being fed whether they asked to be or not. That is the world my
family comes from — the same hills and coastline that gave Italy its most generous food, the Amalfi Coast on
one side and the green Cilento on the other. When we say Southern Italian, we don’t mean a style on
a menu. We mean this: feed people like you love them, because you do.

My nonna baked focaccia the way other people breathe — without thinking, every few days, a tray cooling
on the windowsill before it was even cut. My mother learned it standing on a chair beside her. And mamma,
in turn, taught it to us, with flour on her apron and a wooden spoon as a pointer. No scale. No timer. Just
“until it feels right” and “you’ll know.”

The focaccia that started everything

If you have only ever met focaccia as a dry square from a supermarket shelf, I’m sorry — that wasn’t the
real thing. Real Southern Italian focaccia is alive. The dough is soft and a little wet,
almost too sticky to handle, and that is exactly the point. You let it rest, slowly, so the flour can drink
the water and the yeast can take its time. Slow dough is happy dough. Rushed dough is the kind that fights
you.

Then comes the part mamma never let anyone skip: the dimples. You press your fingertips deep into the
risen dough — all the way down, not shy little pokes — so it looks like the surface of the sea after rain.
Those little wells catch the good oil and the salt. A generous pour of olive oil, flaky salt, sometimes a
scatter of rosemary or a few cherry tomatoes pressed in like jewels, and into a very hot oven it goes.

What comes out is gold on top, soft and airy inside, crisp where the oil pooled at the edges. You tear it
with your hands — you never cut mamma’s focaccia with a knife at the table, that’s a small tragedy — and you
eat the first piece standing up, too hot, burning your fingers, because waiting is impossible. That moment,
that first warm bite, is the whole reason we do what we do.

What makes a focaccia authentic, and not just bread with oil on top

People ask us all the time what the secret is. There is no secret — there is only patience and good
ingredients, which in Italy is the same word said twice. A real focaccia needs flour with character, a long
cool rise, a true extra-virgin olive oil (the kind that smells green and peppery, not the kind that smells
of nothing), and salt you can see. That’s it. Four honest things and time.

The mistake most kitchens make is hurry. They proof the dough warm and fast to get it on the table by
lunch, and you can taste the rush — tight, bready, forgettable. We do it the slow way, the Contursi way,
because that hour you don’t rush is the hour that builds the flavour. It’s the difference between bread that
fills you and bread that you remember on the drive home.

And it’s never just the focaccia, of course. In the Cilento and along the Amalfi Coast, bread is the
beginning of a conversation — torn and passed around a table loaded with antipasti, marinated vegetables,
good cheese, a little cured meat. It’s the thing your hand reaches for while the pasta water comes to a boil.
It belongs to a whole way of eating, the one we carried with us.

From the Cilento hills to the Gulf Coast of Sarasota

So how does a focaccia from Contursi Terme end up on a plate in Florida? The honest answer is: the same
way it always travelled — with a family that refused to leave the recipes behind. When we crossed the ocean,
we didn’t pack the furniture that mattered. We packed the way of doing things. The Sunday rhythm.
The open door. The dough that has to feel right under your hands.

Sarasota turned out to be a kinder home than we dared hope. The Gulf light in the late afternoon isn’t so
different from the light over the bay back home. The tomatoes here, in season, can hold their own. And it
turns out that people on the Gulf Coast are hungry for exactly what mamma has always made — not “Italian
food” in quotation marks, but the real thing, made by hands that learned it in a real Italian kitchen.

So we opened our door on the North Trail and started baking. The same focaccia, the same slow dough, the
same brave dimples. We watched strangers take their first warm bite and go quiet for a second — that little
pause we know so well — and then look up and smile. That smile is in every language. That’s Italian
food, Italian mood, and it’s why we’re here.

More than bread: the Sunday that never really ends

I should be honest with you about why a humble flatbread gets a whole story. In our family, focaccia was
never really about the focaccia. It was the excuse. It was the thing that got everyone in the same room —
the cousins, the neighbour who “just stopped by,” the uncle who swore he wasn’t hungry and then ate half the
tray. You’d put it in the middle of the table, still warm, and the meal would build itself around it: a bowl
of olives here, a plate of tomatoes there, the pasta arriving when it arrived. Nobody looked at a clock.

That is the part we were most afraid of losing when we left Italy. Recipes you can carry in a notebook.
But a Sunday — the slow, loud, generous kind, where lunch quietly turns into dinner and no one
minds — that you have to rebuild from scratch, in a new place, with new faces around the table. The focaccia
was how we did it. We baked it the first weekend we had an oven that worked, and the smell did what it always
does: it filled the rooms, and somehow, the rooms filled with people.

Now we get to watch it happen for other families, too. A grandmother teaching a grandchild to press the
dimples. A table of friends who came in for “a quick bite” and are still there an hour later, tearing the
last corner of the bread in half so no one goes without. Those are the afternoons that make this whole thing
worth it. We didn’t just bring a recipe across the ocean — we brought the reason for it. And in Sarasota,
it turns out, people were waiting for exactly that.

Pull up a chair — where to taste mamma’s focaccia in Sarasota

This is the part where mamma would stop talking and simply hand you a plate. The focaccia is part of what
we do every day at My Mamma in Sarasota, alongside handmade pasta, antipasti, and the rest of the recipes
that came over the ocean with us. The best way to understand a story like this is to taste it, so
have a look at tonight’s menu and come see us — there’s always room for one more at the
table.

And when you want that same focaccia, that same warm welcome, at your table — a wedding, a
family celebration, a long Sunday with everyone you love — that’s what our
catering is for. We’ll bring the Contursi kitchen to your event, dimples and all.