Focaccia is an Italian bread, there are many variant of it, here is one full of flavour, to enjoy plain, as a sandwich bread, or just drizzled with olive oil. You can make one big loaf, but I prefer making mine into small individual breads.
ingredients:
500g white flour (maida)
7g dried powdered yeast
1 teaspoon of salt
3 table spoon olive oil + extra to brush
2-3 table spoon dried rosemary
1/2 cup black pitted sliced olives
1) In a mixing bowl sift the flour, yeast and salt, add the rosemary, olives and oil, and mix, then gradually add water to make a soft elastic dough. Knead the dough for about 10 minutes, punching it and folding it energetically on a lightly floured surface.
2) Put a baking parchment or grease a baking tray and flatten your ball of kneaded dough on it so that it is about 2 centimetre thick all over. Cover the tray with a clean kitchen towel and fold the fabric under the tray, let the dough rise for 45 minutes.
3) Preheat the oven to 230 degrees Celsius. Lift the towel and soak your finger in water and punch holes all over your loaf, then brush so olive oil on it.
4) Bake for 15 minutes or until golden brown, immediately cover the loaf with a clean kitchen towel and let it cool down that way. Covering the loaf ensure that the crust remains soft during the cooling process.
| - You can make a plain focaccia just using salt and olive oil in the dough, or add green olives, sun dried tomatoes, capers, to vary the taste. - the most important thing when baking bread is to have a good yeast, this is the toughest thing to find in India, sadly I get mine from Switzerland, but you can always ask your baker where to get good quality yeast fresh or dried…don’t let this deter you from trying to bake bread, you might have a few trial and errors to go through. |
3 comments:
Yummy, htat sounds good. What kind of flour do you use (I don't know what maida is) ?
Maida is plain white flour, I forgot to mention this in brackets.
Oh right, I must try this.
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