Focaccia and Roasted Garlic

mmmmm.... focaccia bread... my personal favorite. Out of all the yummy bread that I could choose to eat, I would choose this 9 times out of 10.

Now today's post is going to be less than regular geeky, but I thought it would be worth posting about anyway. 

I went over to my best friend's yesterday and helped her prepare a wonderful meal for a group of us that were getting together later that night.

So the menu consisted of the following: homemade lasagna, focaccia bread and roasted garlic.

We started off with the focaccia bread, which turned out to be a lot easier than I had anticipated.

7 cups all-purpose flour

2 tbsp white sugar

5 tsp dry active yeast

1 1/2 tbsp of kosher salt

1 tsp of pepper

2 1/2 cups warm water

1/4 cup olive oil

We started off by adding the dry active yeast into the warm water. This apparently activates the yeast and you can tell if it's still good or not. Then add in the olive oil.

Next we added the flour, sugar, salt and pepper into a large mixing bowl and give them a stir.

Slowly start mixing the two together, making sure you stir in all the water. This is where they say you should turn to a mixer on a dough setting, but well, we didn't have one of those. So it was time to break out the muscle and stir like there was no tomorrow. And when that becomes too hard, kneed, punch and finagle the dough until it looks just right.

I found punching the dough to be very fun and almost a little therapeutic.

Divide the dough into 2 separate halves and slightly grease, wrap in plastic bag or plastic wrap. Then place it somewhere warm like a window or in a low heated oven (100' or so) for 25-30 minutes or until it doubles in size.

Unwrap the dough and form in the shape you want it on a pan.

Cover them back up with the plastic and place back in the sun or oven until it doubles in size again.

 

Remove the plastic and make finger indentations along the top of the dough to hold your ingredients. Top with any ingredients you want. We topped them both with sea salt, then one with chili and garlic, and the other with dried onion.

 

Bake in the oven at 350' for 25-30 minutes

It's going to look so good that you won't even be able to get a picture of it until it's already half gone. lol.
This recipe comes to you from Marty's World Famous Cookbook

Next time I try to make this, maybe I'll shape it into a Yoda head and sprinkle it with parsley or something :P

We Also made some roasted garlic, which is super easy. All you have to do is cut off the tops of the garlic,

place them in a pan and drizzle them with oil and salt

flip them over so that they face down and put them in the oven at 250' for 1 hour.

They should be so soft and moist when you take them out that they will be spreadable. Now go and spread some on that freshly baked bread and enjoy!