Homemade Focaccia

Mar 24

Mar 24 Homemade Focaccia

With Garlic, Rosemary and Red Chili Flakes

This post might end up just being a simple love letter to a focaccia recipe. Bear with me.

Let’s first talk about all the amazing smells wafting from the kitchen. Garlic mixed with rosemary, and of course that heavenly scent of homemade bread baking. Oh, and that fresh-from-the-oven first bite that starts off crispy (thanks to a generous application of olive oil) and then turns soft when you reach the interior…so delicious.

I’m also in love with this recipe because you can achieve this beautiful focaccia in under two hours by following a few basic steps. Homemade bread in 2 hours start to finish? Unheard of but true. And most of those 2 hours is entirely hands off. It's a great recipe for novice bread bakers and for anyone who simply wants amazing bread and doesn’t want to spend 24 hours creating a starter. I can’t recommend this enough.

The recipe on suggests some seasonings but you can customize it to your personal taste like I did. See below in the “tips” section.

Serve it along side pasta, or get creative and use it in place of a burger bun or the bread in your Guy Kibbe (Egg in a nest). If you have leftovers after a few days, you could toast up some cubes in the oven and make a fantastic panzanella salad with it.

Crisp and fluffy close-up. (Photo by Daniel Marks)

Homemade Focaccia Recipe:

https://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/blitz-bread-no-fuss-focaccia-recipe

Yield:
1, 9x13 inch loaf

Difficulty:
Easy

A few tips:

Care for your yeast
For the warm water called for in the recipe, use water that’s between 80-100° F. Anything cooler won’t activate the yeast, and hotter water will kill it.

How to customize flavors
I customized the recipe by skipping their pizza seasonings and powdered cheese ingredients and instead mixed 2 tsp garlic powder right into the dough along with 4 tsp dried rosemary. Just before baking, I sprinkled more dried rosemary and dried red pepper flakes across the top. Normally I would opt for fresh rosemary and garlic but I’m avoiding the supermarket at the moment due to covid-19. And, as it turned out, the dried works out beautifully.

My choice for dried herbs: Rosemary is a traditional seasoning for Focaccia so I went in that direction, and I like a little heat, so I also added dried chili flakes.

Working with the dough
The dough is sticky to work with, so fortunately you don’t have to work with it much. I used a bowl scraper to get it out of my mixing bowl into the baking pan on one piece. You don’t want to tear at the dough to get it out or you’ll break the strands of gluten. I also lightly coated my fingers with olive oil when spreading the dough out in the pan. All very easy.

If you’re new to bread making you might also want to check out the accompanying blog post that includes a few extra tips: https://www.kingarthurflour.com/blog/2008/07/03/yeast-bread-in-a-hurry-it-doesnt-have-to-take-forever-honest