Easy Wholewheat Focaccia Bread
I’m quite new to bread making and I’m using these unusual times to learn how to bake more bread. The loafs I made so far are a bit hard and quite tough too make, so I decided to give focaccia bread a try. I found a couple of images with beautiful breads that were decorated with plants and vegetables, so below you can find my take on the traditional focaccia.
The process of preparing the focaccia is simple and decorating is so much fun. If you’re anything like me, you are impatient with recipes that require time to leave the ingredients in the fridge for a couple of hours or over night. What I understood after making this bread is that even though you need 8+ hours of leaving the dough in the fridge, you have 8+ hours to do anything else like cleaning, reading, or playing Houseparty. This recipe is not a quick meal, but one that will make a great dinner, breakfast or lunch the next day.
This recipe requires only a couple of ingredients and you can easy swap them with what you have available in the pantry. See my notes below on swap recommendations:
wholewheat flour - you can use plain flour, bread flour or a combination of gluten free flour (if you go for the last option, the gluten free flours will slightly change the consistency of the bread);
active dry yeast - this type of yeast is quite easy to find, but feel free to use fresh yeast if you have it or a combination of baking powder and baking soda;
the other 3 ingredients are warm water, sea salt (feel free to use regular salt) and olive oil.
This dough requires two sitting times:
8+ hours in the fridge - I usually leave the dough in the bowl for over 8 hours, but it’s okay to even leave it overnight and bake it the second day;
2-3 hours in a warm room - to allow the dough to raise even more in the pan used to bake the bread. You might need less time if your kitchen is really warm. I usually keep an eye on it every now and then and stop the process when the dough raised enough.
Last time I baked this bread, I made the dough on Saturday morning, got it out in the afternoon to place it in a pan, and baked it for dinner. The focaccia bread was served next to a creamy mushroom soup and courgette fritters.
To decorate, I used vegetables I had at hand. I’m still learning when is the best moment to add the vegetables to avoid getting them too brown. Red onion gets brown easily, but who does not like caramelized onion, right? :)
I hope you’ll try to bake this recipe and have some fun decorating!
DS xx
Easy Wholewheat Focaccia Bread
Ingredients:
4 cups wholewheat flour
2 1/4 tsp active dry yeast
2 tsp sea salt
2 cups warm water
4 Tbs olive oil
Instructions:
In a bowl, mix together the flour, yeast and salt. Add the water and whisk everything together until you form a soft dough. Cover the bowl with foil and leave it in the fridge for 8+ hours.
Take a pan, grease it with a bit of oil, line it with parchment paper and add a bit more oil on it.
Put 2 tbs olive on the dough to make it easier to take it out of the bowl. Fold it a couple of times for a few seconds until you make a ball.
Add the dough ball in the pan and stretch it with your hands. It does not need to fit the pan as the dough needs space to grow. Leave the dough in the pan for 2-3 hours (see notes above regarding timing).
Optional: If you want to get creative, you can pick a couple of greens and vegetables you have in the fridge and play with them. I created a couple of flowers with courgette peel for the stems, red pepper and red onion for the blossoms. The “earth“ is made of pumpkin seeds. You can entirely skip this step and add some flaky sea salt and rosemary or any other kind of herbs you have around.
See my final result below and let me know what you think:
