Free Foccacia Recipe - And a Review for Dummies

Gosh! I seem to have lost my mojo there! Until this weekend I seem to have come to a full stop on making things. Maybe I overdosed with blog hos, or maybe I'd just come to rely on the next blog ho telling me what I should make?

Either way, here's oping the dry spell is over!

I felt like doing a little baking. I'm not that good at it, but I do enjoy it. Especially making bread. Tips always welcome. Especially for helping me tell when I should take it out of the oven. I can't seem to tell when it makes a hollow sound when I tap the cooked loaf.

I went a bit more out of my comfort zone this time and decided to make foccacia.

I used a free recipe I found at Allrecipes. I'm not very good at sticking to recipes, so I substituted some freekah flour in with the strong white flour (only 100g out of the 500g). I also used easy yeast instead of fresh yeast too and these things made the dough very wet. I added more flour to try and get it into a lump but was worried about the amount of flour I was adding so it was still a little wet when I left it rise for the first time.

Then I fell asleep and gave it an hour too much rising time and was greeted with this.

It had risen to the top of the bowl and had started to overflow. and it had risen up through the open weave of the tea towel I had put on top of it. The tea towel was written off as collatteral damage.

It didn't get much better when I tipped it out on the worktop to give it a knead as it just started to spread.

Later on came the real crisis though! I tipped it on the baking tray and it carried on spreading! I had to shout for help from G giving him a 10 second time scale for immenent bread related spillage. The tray I was using was just too small. I didn't have enough hands and the dough wouldn't stop growing and was about to go over he edge of the tray and the worktop onto the floor.

But he saved me like he always does.

I took this photo with my hand in shot to show the scale of the monster I had created.

But in the end all was ok (ish)

I'd welded it to the baking parchment! It tasted nice though :)