Let there be bread - Focaccia!

I guess a lot of us must have heard about this group of bloggers called 'Daring Bakers'. These folks bring to us exquisite baked goods that we believe exist only in fancy shops or delicatessen! They actually surpass them at times...

Apart from tasting amazing, they appear so surreal, like this form of art that has been so meticulously crafted out of mundane materials like flour, sugar, yeast and fruits. And they make it look so simple by doing it time after time after time again!

Well, we'd call ourselves "Barely Bakers" :) because we've tried our hands on the most basic breads a few times but haven't met with success unfortunately. Sometimes, the dough wasn't cooked all the way, sometimes the crust was too hard to be bit into, sometimes the temperature was too darn high and this one time the dough refused to rise! This prompted me to get in touch with a couple of such daring bakers and pick their brains a little bit. Deeba and Rosa, thank you so much for not letting the 'baking spirit' inside me perish for good :) After this endeavor, it is well alive and raring to try out new things!

So here it is: our first ever 'successful' bread. By that we mean:

* The bread was edible

* The dough was cooked all the way across,

* It was moist and

* The bread didnt turn into a brick the following day!

We chose to try out a Focaccia bread.

We followed Deeba's Focaccia recipe, although I am sure that there are numerous Focaccia recipes available across the blogosphere. However, we excluded the whole wheat from her recipe and cut down the amount of ingredients by half (except the yeast) so that even if the bread didn't come out successfully, we wouldn't end up wasting that much stuff!! Of course, we regret that decision now :)

Ingredients:

3 cups all purpose flour

2 tbsp active dry yeast

1.5 tsp sugar

1.5 cups lukewarm water

some dry chives, oregano, basil and parsley flakes

2 tsp salt

2 tbsp olive oil

Basically, we proofed the yeast by adding it to lukewarm water (which is already mixed with sugar). Then we added this to the other dry ingredients to form a not so sticky dough. Then we balled it up in an oiled bowl and let it rise until it roughly doubled in volume. Then ball was then put in a greased baking dish. We used an 8 inch porcelain dish which was 1.5 inches deep. We sprinkled the top of the dough with olive oil and let it rise for some more time (about 30 mins). Finally, we garnished with some onions (juliennes), freshly chopped garlic and dried basil on the top and baked at 400F for 35 minutes.

Here is how it looked like before I put it in the oven and started flitting around like a parent outside an ICU!

It was a nice feeling to see the bread come out fragrant and moist. It tasted great too :) We had some with a sun-dried tomato dip right away, fearing that the bread might turn from pillow to pallet the next day! I was pleasantly surprised when that did not happen :)

But I feel that I left it a couple of minutes too long in the oven and the baking dish was a shade small.

And now some more teases on the bakeware. We bought a bunch of stuff from a store called Ross. We bought a porcelain baking set (one rectangular tray, one circular tray used for the Focaccia and two ramekins)....for just $10.50 :) Thats just Rs. 500! This was followed by a 25 lb (11.3 kgs!) of all purpose flour. You get the drift ;) So stay tuned for some more baked goods on our blog :)