Focaccia

Wow, it seems like it’s been forever since I last posted…blame school for that one. Finally, it’s all winding down and I plan to assume the coasting position. While I’ve been less than prompt about posting new recipes, I have been cooking/baking a lot! In the next few days I’ll be posting a few of the things I have made in the past week, starting with focaccia. Enjoy.

One of my new years resolutions was to bake my way through the Bread Baker’s Apprentice. I think out of the fifty different formulas, I have made five. Not so bad, but not so good either. In my defense school ends up taking precedence to bread baking. However, I can’t use school as my only excuse for the lack of loaves popping out of my oven. First of all when I made the resolution it was winter break and I had oodles of time on my hands. Now, the weekends come around and it seems like they only last for five minutes so, devoting an entire day to bread kinda gets me un-psyched. Today I will once again resolve to bake my way through this amazing book; I will bake focaccia. Because this came from the Bread Baker’s Apprentice there will be no recipe. But I would be kind of a jerk if I just left you hanging like that! Click here for, what looks like, a great recipe.

Note: this baker uses a pre-ferment called a poolish, the recipe I used, did not. A Pre-ferment, made and proofed prior to the combination of the main ingredients, helps to improve shelf life and develop a wonderful flavor for your bread. It’s usually just water, flour, and yeast.

I had never attempted focaccia, let alone, remember it tasting that great, or being particularly impressed by it. I know now that whatever focaccia I have had in the past was made poorly because this bread tasted incredible. Crispy and flakey on the outside, but soft, almost gooey, on the inside. I probably ate 6 ounces of it once I took it out of the oven.

My dough came out having a slightly green tint because of the the olive oil I was using.

The picture on the left is after I had “panned” the dough and poured half of the herb oil on it. After this point it gets popped in the fridge over night. The picture on the right is the dough waiting to be put in the oven.

Here it is! Fresh out of the oven. I wish everyone could have been there for this moment. It would have prevented me from eating so much of it.

That’s it for now. We went climbing all day and my fingertips almost hurt too much to type. More recipes to come!