There was more Jethro Tull on the playlist while making this bread; this time it was 1987's "Crest of a Knave" which beat Metallica to a Grammy Award for best heavy metal album around the time it was released.
Focaccia Bread is something that reminds me of my childhood as my parents would often buy it from the supermarket to have as a side dish to a salad. The key to making decent Focaccia is to make the dough soft and give it plenty of flavour and with this in mind I mixed together fifteen ounces of wholemeal bread flour, a tablespoon and a half of yeast and two teaspoons of dried sage. As with all the best breads it is important to get some flavouring into the mix early on by mixing it with the dry ingredients and this was the reason why I added in the sage at this time.
I next added in six teaspoons of olive oil with nine fluid ounces of cold water and stirred the whole mixture until the dry ingredients had become part of the wet ingredients and there were no loose parts of the dry ingredients left in the mixing bowl.
I then kneaded the dough heavily for about five minutes until I had a soft piece of dough that was as easy to shape as Plastecine. I placed the dough on a greased baking tray and made an indent in the middle of it that was around five centimetres deep and two or three centimetres wide. Either side of the indent I used the other end of a wooden spoon to poke holes in the bread that I filled with dried sage. I also added raw red onion to the indent in the dough and then glazed the bread with Olive Oil using a brush.
I then cooked the bread in the oven for around twenty five minutes at 190 degrees (or 200 degrees if you don't have a fan oven). The bread had a real taste of Christmas Dinner about it with the sage and onion and the wholemeal bread flour provided it with a more savoury taste than it would have had if I had used white bread flour.
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| Above before putting in the oven the bread was strewn with onions and olive oil. |
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| Sliced and ready to serve. |
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