Home-made Focaccia

Apart from pizza dough, I've never made bread before, but since I decided I wanted to cook more, I knew bread making was something I definitely wanted to try. Focaccia, an Italian bread made with olive oil, seemed exactly like the sort of bread I'd enjoy both making and eating. We used Paul Hollywood's recipe in How To Bake. It isn't too challenging, but with waiting for the bread to rise and prove, it takes over three hours of preparation, though it doesn't feel like that long. It's definitely worth it though!

It started off very similar to the pizza dough recipe, but with different amounts of the ingredients.

 Kneading the bread

Once the bread had risen

 Dividing the dough into two loaves

 Before and after proving for an hour

Before cooking

After cooking

We had hummous, vegan cheese and olives with feta with one of the loaves of focaccia as a starter. The vegan cheese went especially well with it, and (admittedly between seven of us) the whole lot disappeared within minutes.