Veganuary Focaccia Olive Bread
Hey guys!
I was invited by the fantastic Veganuary to cook out live on their Instagram, which was awesome. I got the chance to do a home made carbonara using vegan bacon, made of bananas! Crazy but delicious and the response was wonderful. I wanted to cook out a baked focaccia which I really enjoyed to go with any pasta, or a salad, or a treat! Whatever you fancy. You could slice it in half and make a pizza out of it and be really extra.
Ingredients
500g Bread Flour
350ml Warm Water
7g Yeast
4 tbsp Olive oil
2 tsp Salt
Rosemary
Peppercorns
Garlic Powder
Onion Powder
Black Olives
So I guess baking is my least favourite thing to do but I’m quite good at it, compared to desserts anyway. Desserts are my worst thing to make, I am amazing at tasty savoury things, I am good at the baking but I find sweet things really hard, probably because I don’t love sweet things to eat haha. So the way to make a focaccia, you need to start off by sieving the bread flour with the instant yeast, mine came in sachets of 15g and I used half. I added salt, garlic and onion powder. You then spoon in the olive oil and you use a chunky spoon to get the olive oil into the flour in like ribbons and it basically disappears haha.
Next you want to add the warm water, if you want to change the recipe you could use warm oat milk which would give it a rustic and lighter texture. I did the easy version and I used water. You make a well in the middle, and feed the water into the bowl, and you get this very wet dough. You don’t ever get like a ball of dough with focaccia because you want it to be wet and bubbly so when you cut into the final product you see all the work you’ve done!
Now you don’t want to over beat it at all but you want it to be smooth enough that it looks almost like a bubble of dough, you don’t want it to appear lumpy and for me it took six minutes of mixing. Don’t go crazy, use a large spoon and just keep it moving and the magic will happen. I sliced up some black olives and mixed within it and prepped a baking trey with more olive oil on a kitchen towel, you don’t want it to stick. You’d can always add breadcrumbs to the base of a dish to help also with this. Now my trick is to put a damp kitchen towel over the top of the bowl and leave it by the warm oven. It takes an hour to prove, which is when the yeast is eating things and creating all these gas bubbles which bring the bread to life.
I came back to the super raised bread and popped it into the trey with some sprinkles of rosemary. Throw in some peppercorns, sea salt and some drizzles of more olive oil. Now the trick is to leave it there for about 30 minutes with again a covered kitchen towel, the dough eats away at the rosemary and sort of folds it into the top layers and it works fantastically. I popped on the oven to 220 degrees C and got ready to bake.
So when I got to 15 minutes of baking, I saw how high the bread had raised, and because it’s not conventional where you are supposed to squash out the air bubbles before you bake, I then did it when it’s PART baked! Cos I wanted to! So I used my fingers but to be safe use a spoon, and I squashed into the warm bread little divets across the whole thing, every inch or so.
Then I baked it for another 10 minutes and left it to cool before serving. It was amazing, and you can reheat it up the next day if you don’t want to have it all at once. I served it with some of my honey dressing and it was just awesome.
Let me know what you think at home. Check out the dressing recipe here.
