Don’t be alarmed, puccia is Italian for little cheeks, which is apparently what these rolls look like to those Italians out there. They do of course have a bit of a tendency to name their food curiously. Do you know what linguine actually means? Little tongues. How bout capellini? Little worms. What about ciabatta? Slipper. Alright so that last one is a bit understandable (see here for example). So black olive cheeks are perhaps a bit less unappetizing than some of the others, but we should at least thank those Italians for making us blissfully unaware of what we are actually saying. But then again if we are speaking in our L2 and if we think about meaning not from its referential basis alone, but from the context in which it is used then I suppose we really aren’t saying anything apart from what we actually ‘think’ that we are saying, but at any rate let’s get away from these issues of the pragmatics and semantics and onto the recipe shall we?
Just so that you know that you are getting into here’s a breakdown of the time (flexible) involved.
Courtesy of Daniel Leader of Bread Alone fame (Local Breads
9-17 hours to mix and ferment the biga
10-15 minutes to knead
1 ½ to 2hours to ferment
45 minutes to 1 hour to proof
20-25 minutes to bake
Biga
1/3 cup of water
½ teaspoon instant yeast
2/3 cup bread flour
Pour the water into a small mixing bowl. With a rubber spatula, stir in the yeast and flour just until a dough forms. It’ll feel something like a pie dough. Knead the dough for 1 and 2 minutes just enough to work in all the flour, to the point where it is fairly, but not perfectly smooth. Put the dough back into the bowl, cover it with plastic wrap and place it in the fridge overnight. It will roughly double in volume, become porous and’ll smell slightly acidic.
Bread Dough
Biga – (this will be about 1 cup)
Water – 1 ½ cups
Instant yeast – 1 tsp
Unbleached Bread Flour – 3 ¼ cups
Sea salt (or any other salt, no need to be more pretentious when this bread already goes by the name of ‘puccia’)
Oil-cured olives – 1 ½ cups (this will seem like a lot, but really it’s not)
Rosemary – 2 tbs (or however much you would like)
1. Remove the biga and scrape it into a large bowl, pour the water over the biga and stir it with a rubber spatula to soften it and break it into clumps. Stir in the yeast, flour and salt until a dough forms.
2. Lightly flour the counter and scrape the dough out onto it. Knead until it is soft and almost smooth (about 10 minutes, oh and I swear if you knead the dough you’ll actually see that these descriptions actually do make sense)
4. Press the dough out onto a rectangular, and spread the olives over it. This will seem like a lot, but just knead it and you’ll see it all come together.
The other bonus of the olives is that they will in effect rehydrate the dough which will help with the air bubbles later. Once the olives are evenly distributed and the dough is smooth and elastic (about 5-7 minutes), form the dough into a bowl, cover with plastic wrap and leave it to rise until it doubles in volume (about 75 minutes).
5. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured countertop and divide the dough into as many pieces as you like. I divided it into 8, the recipe calls for 20 pieces, but you could just as easily turn this into 2 large boules.
6. Shape the pieces into balls (or ‘boules’ if you will). Place them onto the baking sheet and drape plastic wrap over them. Let them rise for about 1 hour.
7. 15 minutes before baking, heat the oven to 400 degrees. Bake until they are honey colored, 20-25 minutes, rotating them halfway through the baking.
8. Let them cool and use for whatever you like. You could whip up some of this quick BBQ sauce, throw some chicken (or pulled pork, or eggplant or keep with the portobellos as below) between these slices.
lepainmonger 
Fabulous bread, fabulous photos.