easy no-knead focaccia bread.

The third recipe in the Basically Guide to Better Baking is Shockingly Easy No-Knead Focaccia bread. I love bread so I am always in the lookout for a good bread recipe. I thought this recipe sounded interesting because no kneading was required. Am I a great bread kneader? Probably not. I need to practice some more. I usually just hit the dough with my knuckles until I think it’s ready (perhaps that’s why I haven’t made a great batch of bread yet?).

I love going to Italian restaurants because you usually get some focaccia bread and olive oil as an appetizer. This bread is fantastic at soaking up yummy sauces and oil. So, I was excited to try to make my own version so I could eat it all by myself (not really but I did eat a good chunk of it)!

Some thoughts on this recipe:

• I almost ran out of flour when making this recipe. It calls for five cups of flour and luckily, I had just exactly 5 cups. That was good, because the only other flour I have is that buckwheat flour from the buckwheat chocolate chip cookies, and considering I was not a huge fan of those cookies, I was not going to use that flour in this bread.
• The bread takes a while to make. First, you have to make the dough, and then let it rise in your fridge. Then you place the dough in the pan and let it rise again. My apartment has been fairly cold so I put the pan next to the stove while it was preheating and the dough still took almost two hours to rise to where I wanted it to be.
• There is so much olive oil in this recipe. So much! When I placed the dough in the bowl for its first rise, it looked like the dough was swimming in this pool of oil. Then when I put the dough in the pan, the recipe called for even more olive oil. I am clearly not a savvy bread baker because I did not understand what all this olive oil was for.
• The focaccia could have had a bit more flavor. I’m not sure if it needed more salt or more garlic or what. I also couldn’t really taste the garlic that I brushed on top when the bread was done baking even though I used four cloves.

Final thoughts on this recipe:

• Would I make no-knead focaccia again? Probably. I think this bread would go great with anything pasta related. It has a lot of holes so you know it’s going to soak up all the sauce. You could also slice the bread in half and use it to make a sandwich or just eat it with more olive oil.

Q: How do you pronounce focaccia? Three syllables or four?