Olive Oil Wreath Bread

This olive oil wreath bread makes a wonderful and flavorful pull-apart bread. Perfect for the center of your table. 

This bread is flavored with fruity extra virgin olive oil, shaped into a ring, and then cut with scissors as you would a pain de èpi. 

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.

Apricot, Almond, & Olive Oil Cake with Vanilla and Lemon

This apricot, almond, & olive oil cake is incredibly moist, and the flavors of the apricots, lemon zest, almond flour, and vanilla seeds combine perfectly to create a delicate and tasty cake.

Sourdough Crackers | The Leftover Sourdough Starter Dilemma

These sourdough crackers are made with unfed sourdough starter. They have the tang of sourdough bread, and are a great way to use up the starter that you would normally throw away when feeding your levain.

Garlicky Rib Eye Steak with Garlic Bruschetta and Aged Balsamic

This Garlicky Ribeye Steak with Garlic Bruschetta and Aged Balsamic was pretty much a revelation.

Placing the steak on grilled garlic bruschetta and having a bit of each on each forkful was sooooo good! Even my steak and potatoes Irish-born husband, who would just as soon skip anything garlic, said he would have skipped the potato (as did I) if he'd known how good this combination was.

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.

Sourdough Rosemary Bread with Olive Oil

This sourdough rosemary bread with olive oil is made with both natural and commercial yeast. If you'd like to skip the commercial yeast in the final dough for a stronger sourdough flavor, just allow for a longer rise time.

This bread is wonderful dipped in olive oil and balsamic with some ground pepper, or even made into garlic cheese toast. It also makes excellent garlic croutons. The crust is super crunchy, and the bread itself is so full of the flavor of rosemary.

If you don't have a sourdough starter, you can substitute a poolish. Mix about 7 ounces of water with 7 ounces of flour, add a 1/4 tsp. of instant yeast, stir, cover, and let the mixture sit for about 8 hours at room temperature and then overnight in the refrigerator.

Sourdough Rosemary Bread with Olive Oil Recipe

Makes two 20 ounce loaves

Adapted from Amy's Bread, Revised and Updated: Artisan-style breads, sandwiches, pizzas, and more from New York City's favorite bakery

Ingredients

2 ounces warm water (105 to 110 degrees F)

1 tsp active dry yeast

14 ounces 100% hydration sourdough starter

8 ounces room temperature water

3 T. extra virgin olive oil

1/4 C fresh rosemary, chopped

15.3 ounces unbleached all purpose flour

2.8 ounces whole wheat flour

1 T plus 2 tsp Kosher salt

Instructions

1. In the bowl of a stand mixer, combine the warm water and yeast and let it sit for about 5 minutes until foamy.
2. Add the starter, the water, olive oil, and rosemary and mix with you hands, a dough whisk, or the paddle attachment for a couple of minutes. 
3. Add the flour and salt and mix on low with the dough hook until it comes together. Scrape the sides of the bowl with a bowl scraper and adjust the hydration with extra water or flour. 
4. Knead on medium low for about 7 minutes. Let the dough rest, covered with plastic wrap, for 20 minutes. Knead for another couple of minutes. The dough should be soft, tacky, and not very stiff. 
5. Put the dough into an oiled bowl or dough rising bucket and let it rise, covered with plastic wrap, for one hour. After and hour, deflate the dough by folding it over itself from all four "sides" and then placing it seam side down in the oiled bowl. Cover and refrigerated the dough for 8 to 16 hours. 
6. Remove the dough from the refrigerator and allow it to come to room temperature, about 2 hours. 
7. Flour two nine inch brotforms/bannetons (see the photo in this post) or bowls. 
8. Divide the dough into 2 pieces and gently form them into boules. Be careful not to deflate the dough too much. Place them seam side up in the baskets/bowls and cover with plastic wrap. 
9. Allow to rise for about 75 to 120 minutes, until doubled. 
10. In the meantime, place two cast iron Dutch ovens into the oven and preheat it to 450 degrees F.
11. When the dough is ready, carefully remove the pans from the oven, turn the dough out into the pans, slash, cover, and return them to the oven. 
12. Bake, covered, for 20 minutes, carefully remove the lids from the pans, lower the oven temperature to 400 degrees F, and bake for 10 to 15 minutes longer, until the bread interior reaches 200 degrees F. (Note: Sometimes I will move the breads to a sheet pan at about 25 minutes to prevent burning of the bottom of the loaf.)
13. Cool on a wire rack. 

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