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.

Home-made Pizza

I've made pizza from scratch twice before but this is the first time I've used this particular recipe - from Paul Hollywood's Bread. I found it much easier and quicker to make the dough compared to the recipe I've used previously, and the resulting pizza was lovely. The two hardest things are kneading the dough and throwing it to shape it - I gave it a go but ended up just using a rolling pin! Apart from that, it's pretty easy and really tasty.

After kneading the dough, we let it rise for an hour, during which time it pretty much doubled in size. While the dough was rising, I made a sauce for the pizza topping using olive oil, tomato puree, water, garlic, basil and oregano.

Pizza toppings: mushrooms, red peppers, red onions, pepperoni and vegan cheese. Some of us also added Stilton!

 Aaand here are the final results! The pizzas take only ten minutes in the oven. The recipe was meant for three pizzas not four so ours were slightly small (not to mention funny-shaped!) but they were still pretty filling, especially with the salad. We reckon they were healthy too!

My pizza :)