Sourdough Focaccia

This sourdough focaccia is light and airy, and loaded with flavor. You can top it simply with some olive oil, herbs, and sea salt for a delicious dipping bread to go with your meal. 

You can split squares of this bread through the middle to make sandwiches like you might find in an Italian American deli and load it up with deli meats, cheeses, pesto, and veggies. You'll have the perfect sandwich for a picnic. 

Fluffy Focaccia with Garlic Oil and Herbes de Provence

This fluffy focaccia with garlic oil and herbes de Provence is crispy and airy, and just the right size for serving four to six for dinner.  

This focaccia has a super soft interior with a thin and crispy crust. It takes very little effort make. There's no kneading required... just four stretch and folds every 15 minutes to develop the dough. It rises beautifully and is simple to shape. 

Herb Oil Focaccia

Herb oil focaccia is light and airy on the inside with a thin and crispy crust. It's generously flavored with an herb infused olive oil and goes with just about everything. 

 

Focaccia is an Italian yeasted flatbread typically made with flour, water, salt, yeast, (and sometimes a bit of sugar to feed the yeast), and lots of olive oil. 

Roasted Pepper and Chile Focaccia

This roasted pepper and chile focaccia is light, airy, and amazing, and it is filled with chunks of mozzarella cheese, cherry tomatoes, and topped with roasted sweet peppers and chiles. 

Topped with the roasted sweet peppers and mild chiles, this focaccia is so versatile. It is delicious for breakfast, for a snack, with a salad or soup for lunch, and with pasta for dinner.... or, it can be a wonderful light dinner on its own!

Christmas Wreath Focaccia

This Christmas wreath focaccia is fun to decorate and even more fun to eat. 

 

To decorate it, I used large flat leaf parsley (which I had growing in a pot on my patio), scallions, cherry tomatoes, mini pepperonis, mini sweet peppers, and, to add flavor, mini fresh mozzarella pearls. 

Potato Focaccine

Potato focaccine is a version of an Italian snacking bread. Focaccines are mini focaccias, and can contain any typical focaccia ingredients and extras. 

The dough for these focaccine includes over a 35 percent potatoes to flour, which makes them less airy than most focaccia. They are soft and moist, and delicious for snacking. 

Potato Rosemary Focaccia

This potato rosemary focaccia is so easy to make. In fact, if you are new to making bread, give focaccia a try. You'll be so pleased with this light and airy bread that requires very little extra effort.

This focaccia is topped with thinly sliced potatoes that have been tossed with shallots and rosemary, and the dough is flavored with olive oil and a little bit of minced shallots.

BLT Focaccia

This BLT Focaccia is stuffed with mozzarella cheese, bacon, and cherry tomatoes, and topped with more bacon and baby greens.

This BLT focaccia is a delicious take on the classic bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich.

Cheesy Kale, Tomato, and Chile Focaccia

Cheesy Kale, Tomato, and Chile Focaccia. Light and airy, studded with pockets of mozzarella cheese and topped with cherry tomatoes and jalapeño chiles.

I made this focaccia with an 80 percent hydration dough, which I let rise overnight in the refrigerator. You can actually keep this dough in the refrigerator for up to four days before baking, which is wonderful for developing the best flavor.

Spinach and Olive Focaccia

This spinach and olive focaccia is the perfect savory bread to serve with a salad for lunch, and it's an excellent light bread to serve with dinner.

One of the things that I love about this Spinach and Olive Focaccia is that it does not skimp on the spinach. In fact, you may actually get a full serving of spinach with a couple of slices of this bread.

This Spinach and Olive Focaccia begins with a no-knead stretch-and-fold dough.

Bread Box Roundup for November 2016

Welcome to The Bread Box Round Up, a collection of wonderful loaves, rolls, and flatbreads from food bloggers who bake bread! 

I'm starting with these gorgeous Asiago Cheese Bagels from Are You Cooking? Zosia baked my recipe along with the The Bread Baking Babes as a Buddy. What does that mean? Check out her post! Thanks Zosia. I am so happy to feature your gorgeous bagels.

Crispy Herb and Sugar Plum Grape Tomato Focaccia

This crispy Herb and Sugar Plum Grape Tomato Focaccia originally had the descriptor "thin" in it as well, but when I slid it onto the baking stone, it puffed up like crazy! This is not a bad thing. The bread is full of amazing, amazing (yes, I said amazing twice, and now a third time) airiness.

Sourdough Focaccia with Preserves

This Sourdough Focaccia with Preserves takes some time to make, but the results are so worth it. The bread has the tang of sourdough, which is balanced with the honey in the dough and the cream and preserves brushed on top.

Fruit Focaccia | Tuesday's with Dorie

This fruit focaccia is so good for breakfast! It's great eaten unadorned on the day it is baked, and is excellent sliced in half, toasted, and buttered the next day.

The fruit is macerated in hot water for about three hours, and then the resulting liquid is used for the water in the bread. How cool is that?

Roasted Vegetable Focaccia

This roasted vegetable focaccia is the perfect vehicle for all of the zucchini from your or your friends' gardens. Roasting vegetables definitely brings out the sweetness in them and the results are seriously tasty.  I took this focaccia to work the day after making it. I set it in the break room with reheating instructions. It was a huge hit and gone by 10am.

The original recipe calls for roasted green onions. Unfortunately, I burned the green onions into pieces of charred straw.

Fortunately, I found a sweet onion in my pantry, which I sliced, tossed in olive oil and King Arthur Flour Pizza Seasoning, and roasted for about 15 minutes. It turned out to be the perfect addition to this bread.

The participants in the Avid Baker's Challenge are making this recipe from King Arthur Flour this month. To see the original recipe, click here.

Roasted Vegetable Focaccia

Ingredients

Starter

57 g cool water

Pinch of instant yeast

60 g unbleached all purpose flour (I used King Arthur Flour)

Dough

All of the starter

1 tsp instant yeast

57 g lukewarm water

120 g unbleached all purpose flour

Scant 3/4 tsp salt

6 g nonfat dry milk

13 g olive oil

Topping

3 medium zucchini, trimmed and sliced

olive oil

King Arthur Flour pizza seasoning, or other Italian seasoning

1 sweet onion, peeled, halved, and sliced

8 to 10 ounces of grape or cherry tomatoes, sliced in half

Freshly grated Parmesan cheese

Instructions

1. To make the starter, mix the ingredients in a smallish bowl, and cover with plastic wrap. Let sit overnight, about 12 to 14 hours. 
2. Combine all of the ingredients, including the starter, in the bowl of a stand mixer. Knead for about 7 minutes on the second speed. 
3. Place the dough into an oiled bowl and let rise for an hour, covered. 
4. Deflate the dough, re-cover, and let it rise for another hour. 
5. In the meantime, toss the zucchini in olive oil and pizza or Italian seasoning and bake in a 400 degree F oven for about an hour, turning it over half way through. Remove them from the oven earlier if they are golden brown.
6. Toss the onions with olive oil and pizza or Italian seasoning and place them on one side of a half sheet baking pan. Place the tomatoes on the other half of the baking sheet. Bake for 15 minutes at 400 degrees F.
7. Set all of the vegetables aside. 
8. When the dough is ready, sprinkle olive oil into a quarter sheet (13 by 9 inch) pan. If you don't have one, use half of a half sheet pan. 
9. Place the dough into the pan, and dimple it with your fingers to spread the dough out. When the dough begins to spring back, cover it with plastic wrap, and let it rest for 15 minutes. 
10. Continue to dimple the dough and nudge it out to fill the pan. 
11. Place the zucchini on top of the dough. Cover with plastic wrap and let it rest until puffy, about 2 to 3 hours. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F.
12. Bake the dough with the zucchini on a lower rack of the oven for 15 minute. Remove the pan from the oven and top with the tomatoes and onions.
13. Bake for another 10 minutes. 
14. Remove from the oven, move the bread to a wire rack, and top with freshly grated Parmesan cheese. 
15. This bread can be reheated in a toaster oven at 350 degrees F for about 5 to 10 minutes. 

This bread has been Yeastspotted 

Leaf-Shaped Fougasse

This fougasse is made from a pretty amazing focaccia dough from the book Baking with Julia, by Dorie Greenspan. The book was written in 1996, and is a chronicle of the recipes from guests of Julia Child's PBS series, Baking with Julia. It's an inspiration.

Pain à l’Ancienne Focaccia

This pain à l’ancienne focaccia is made from a high hydration dough that ferments up to four days in the refrigerator to develop flavor. It is actually the same dough formula that I used for this ciabatta, but the dough is shaped very differently. 

While I sprinkled the top of this bread with King Arthur Flour's pizza seasoning, you can use any combination of herbs, spices, salt, and infused olive oil. You can use this dough as a base for pizza. You can also add additional flavor by pushing chunks of cheese, cherry tomatoes, onions, or anything else that sounds tasty into the dough. 

We enjoyed this focaccia dipped into olive oil and balsamic sprinkled with a few crushed red pepper. 

Focaccia | Tuesdays with Dorie

This week the Tuesdays with Dorie group is baking focaccia. This recipe was created by Craig Kominiak, one of the contributing bakers for the book, Baking with Julia (as in Child) edited by Dorie Greenspan, and based on the PBS series of the same name. I've been having a lot of fun viewing the various videos online before baking the dish of the week.

Focaccia you say? I do have some experience making focaccia, (see my post on roasted pepper and chili focaccia, onion and sage focaccia, fresh berry focaccia (which actually involves this dough), and Bread Baker's Apprentice focaccia.

This dough consists of flour, water, salt, yeast, and olive oil, and is mixed for about 10 minutes in a stand mixer until it is glossy and elastic. Judging from the PBS video of Craig Kominiak making this bread, I would guess that my dough was a little more hydrated than his. I chose to leave it that way because I wanted to see if I could develop a very airy focaccia.

How did this recipe differ from the description in the book? Well, my first rise took 15 minutes when it was supposed to take an hour and a half! What? I checked and rechecked the yeast amount and know I was accurate so I have no idea why this happened. My second rise took 20 minutes while it was supposed to take about an hour. Yikes! This one liter of dough was suddenly 4 liters.

At this point, the dough is divided into three pieces, bagged, and cold fermented over night in the refrigerator to develop flavor.

What did I do differently from the recipe? Instead of baking the breads on the baking stone, I baked mine on oiled quarter sheet pans. I even baked one in the toaster oven. (The same one in which I baked my last post, the Boston cream pie. I'm still very excited to find out that my toaster oven can properly bake cakes and breads). Actually, the one baked in the toaster oven baked faster and browned better. Hmmm.  Also, rather than stretch and slash the dough to get it to the desired size as described in the book, I used my fingertips to dimple it and slowly coax it to the edges of the pan.

Suggested way to season the focaccia breads:  Infuse some olive oil with crushed red peppers and brush it on top of the breads. Sprinkle the loaves with some chopped fresh rosemary and sage, a light dusting of crushed dehydrated onion and garlic, and a light sprinkling of sea salt. So good.

For the complete recipe:  Please visit Wandering Through...  To see others' experiences and ideas with this recipe, visit the Tuesdays with Dorie site and check out the links.

Sharing with Yeastspotting.
Sharing with Tasty Thursdays.

Onion and Sage Focaccia

Sounds cliche, but this bread is amazing.  I'm just saying.

Onion and Sage Focaccia

Adapted from a recipe I've been wanting to try forever by Nancy Silverton and published in the Los Angeles Times

Ingredients

1 risen round of focaccia dough as described in my previous post.

2 ounces low moisture mozzarella cut into 1/2 inch cubes.

1/2 of a large red onion cut into one inch cubes.

Olive oil to brush on the top of the bread.

1/3 C chopped sage leaves (do not chop finely).

Pinch of sea salt.

Fresh Berry Focaccia

I've made focaccia, awesome focaccia, but not sweet focaccia. This dough is typical focaccia dough, but with berries pressed into the dough pieces, and a streusel generously spread over the top. The dough is super wet, requires an overnight refrigeration, and does not contain sugar. The contrast between the slightly savory and sweet is interesting. The dough is really easy to handle.