a tale of 2 foccacias

i was browsing peter reinhart's book on bread baking and got me interested in his foccacia. a search on the net shows a few folks have baked it, ate it and blogged it! best instructions came from annie's eats so i'd rather not repeat here.

i did 2 versions though, both the white and wholemeal versions. at the same time.

i started at 6pm and took out dough from oven at 12.30am! my wife said if only i work so hard in my day job... hate what do you mean?!


white foccacia

• 5 cups unbleached high-gluten or bread flour
• 1 tsp. salt
• 1 tsp. yeast
• 6 tbsp. olive oil
• 2 cups water, at room temperature
• ¼ to ½ cup herb oil 

i used less salt and less yeast, and also less herb oil. having made foccacia couple of times, the herb oil is new to me. however, messy/disorganized me have only rosemary and oreganos, so have to make do with just these 2 herbs.


white foccacia just before baking.

during second rise, i spread out the dough as wide as possible, then made all the dimples using my fingers. herbed olive oil goes on top.

there were hell more dimples i made but after 90 minutes, the dough grew more and obscured some of the holes.




 wholemeal foccacia

• 4 cups of wholemeal (i didn't have enough wholemeal so went for 2 cups wholemeal + 2 cups white)
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp yeast
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 2 cups water (actually you need a little less than this)
• ¼ to ½ cup herb oil 

for the wholemeal foccacia, i made a mistake and used 2 cups of water. it was a very wet dough and i had a mess trying to knead it! in fact, it wasn't kneading at all, just stretching and keeping dough off my fingers.

wholemeal foccacia just before baking.

oh yeah, sprinkle some salt (table salt or sea salt, up to you) on the dough before baking.

the salt brought up a bit more flavour to the whole mix.

the recipe calls for quite a lot of herb oil on the dough. err, it's better to go less. just sufficient to cover the dough.

white foccacia!

wholemeal foccacia!

both taste wonderful! 

feel free to sprinkle some salt before serving.