Just Baking

So, with Parents coming over on Saturday I thought I was pretty much all set in the prep department as I grabbed a rootbeer and walked over to the couch to settle in and play Nofriendo for a while.  From out of the back room, Steph walked in to find me monkeying around. “Do you think we should have some bread for tonight?” she queried. Looking up to see Bruce Campbell laughing at me on the screen, I knew that the new mixer was a callin’ my name as I flipped off the TV.

Now, in our bread class, we watched our teacher make Focaccia bread. She didn’t deviate much from her standard recipe which consisted of:

3 cups flour
1 cup of warm water
3 tablespoons sweet (I go with 1 TBS sugar, 2 TBS honey)
3 tablespoon of salt (I go with 1 1/2 TBS, as 3 tastes too much like a damn pretzel)
3 tablespoons of oil (I eyeball this)
1 package of yeast

Starting off, I got out my instant read thermometer, made sure the water was about 110ish degrees and mixed in the yeast. I then threw in the sugar (and honey), which the yeast started gobblin’ up like some greedy 6th graders getting a bit o’ honey, then into a cold oven covered to proof for about 10 minutes.

I measured by weight 3 cups of flour…adding about 2 1/2 to the mixing bowl then adding the salt to that ,giving it a quick stir.

I then added in the liquids and let the bread hook do the work, adding the remaining flour. What came out was a nice smooth dough, ready for a rise. What I had done while this mixed was put the oven on ‘Warm’ setting, which I now turned off as I covered the dough with some plastic wrap and then put the dough in the warm oven to rise. It is so clutch to make sure you don’t forget to turn off the oven…first, you burn your hand when taking the dough out…second…the dough cooks which is a total drag!

After about an hour of rising, I took the dough out and punched it down. I put out a bit of parchment paper on a cookie sheet, then pushed the dough out to the corners. That’s right…no wussy rolling pin for me! Frankly, I didn’t want to wash something else I used my finger tips to make some indentations, then back into the sorta warm oven to rise again for a bit.

Now, here was the problem. How to make Focaccia without fresh herbs?? Well…thankfully we had a good deal of dried rosemary hangin’ about.

While the dough was in for the second rise, I threw some rosemary in a 1/3 of a cup of olive oil (hey…it’s Focaccia and we love olive oil!!).

Once the dough rose to what I considered a ‘good place,’ I took it out and drizzled the olive oil/rosemary on top then into a 375 degree oven ’till it was golden brown. As we took it out to ‘rest,’ Steph noticed that there was some olive oil on the bottom of the parchment paper and thought we should take it off. As we were saying this, we noticed the olive oil got sucked back inside the bread!! We both looked at each other and laughed! I know this probably isn’t an “official” Focaccia recipe, but when you have a couple hours before entertaining, this bread really is pretty damn good if I do say so myself! Of course, Steph and myself are carb fiends so this bread didn’t last too long and boy did that oil/rosemary add a nice depth of flavor

FINISHED!!!