- Hi everyone.

Today we're making focaccia, and not just any focaccia, but this beautiful bread art focaccia.

I am so excited to show you how to do this, so let's get started.

(light music) So to get our focaccia bread started, what I have here in the mixing bowl is a cup of warm water, two and a half teaspoons of active yeast, and a little bit of sugar, maybe a teaspoon of sugar.

We've let it just sit for about five minutes or so, so it gets nice and foamy, and you can see that your yeast is doing its little magic.

So now to this mixture, what we're going to do, and here, by the way, I have my bread flour that we're using for the focaccia, five cups or 680 grams.

We're going to add just a cup to get our dough started.

So in here I'm just gonna put a few spoonfuls of the bread flour, and then we're gonna get our mixer going with a dough hook.

Just on low speed.

And we're gonna just let it kind of come together for a few seconds.

I'm gonna take a spatula then, and get the rest of that flour incorporated, and then we'll add the rest of our ingredients.

So as you can see, it's kind of pulling the flour from the sides, but I think I'm gonna give it just a little bit of help, and take my spatula, if I unlock my mixer that would be helpful, and just kind of help get some of that flour down into the actual warm water mixture, help it along a little bit.

After all, we all need a little bit of help from time to time.

So okay, let's get that.

And I'm just really watching for the flour to be incorporated.

This is just our starter dough anyway, so we've still got lots more mixing to do.

So as you can see, it's getting, it's still having that flour on the side there, but I think we're looking pretty good at this point.

And now, to that, we're going to add another cup of water.

We're going to add, this is a teaspoon of salt.

Oops.

Come on out.

And then we have here two tablespoons of olive oil, all into the mix.

And to that now we're just gonna add probably half of what we have got here of the flour, maybe a little bit more, but we wanna save some of the flour out, because focaccia dough overall is kind of a moist sticky dough, so, I mean, we don't wanna put too much, oops, and we want it in the bowl, we don't wanna put too much flour in all at one time, just in case we don't actually need all of it.

So here, we're gonna get us going.

I'll speed it up just a little bit once we get the flour starting to incorporate in.

You probably could do this by hand, but it's gonna take quite a bit of elbow grease for you, so if you have a mixer, by all means, hey, make it a little easier for yourself if you can.

But as you can see here, it's starting to grab the flour from the sides of the bowl, and what we're waiting for really is for the dough itself to start pulling away.

So we want to wait until this kind of gets all incorporated as much as possible, and then we'll see the dough actually start to move away.

I can tell by looking at it that it's still a little bit too wet, oops, and so I'm just gonna start to add a little bit more of my flour.

(light music) Okay, that's, we still have a little bit left in the bowl, but let's get this guy going.

Can you see the flour kind of flying up?

Am I in a dust of flour?

But here we go, so now you can really see that the dough is pulling away from the side.

It's getting all nice and doughy, in that ball sort of form, which is great.

I wanna just stop it a second and feel it, 'cause this, it's pretty tacky, it's a wet dough anyway, but I still think it could probably stand just a little bit more of the flour.

And then with this last addition of the flour, what we're gonna do is just let the mixer go until we can actually touch the dough, and it kind of springs back when we touch it, if we leave any of the flour in.

So it's getting incorporated.

I'm gonna have a nice little clean up when we get ready, but that's all right.

And just kinda watch her go.

I don't know about you, but if your mixer ever jumps like that, like you see that?

I learned, just by chance, that if you lock it, it's a wonderful thing, so.

Most of these mixers have a lock on 'em.

I never knew that before.

So okay, here you see it's, the dough itself is pulled away from the sides, which is excellent.

And now we really just are waiting to get that gluten formation going for our bread.

This is a no knead bread, so we're not pulling it out, we're not kneading it on the counter.

It really is an easy bread, and it's delicious, you'll see.

All right, so let's, let's check, and see what we're doing here.

Oops, unlock it Stephanie.

And so it's, you can see, it's still a little bit sticky.

It's, when I push it, it's not necessarily, you know, resisting, so I want, I'm gonna let it go just a minute or so longer, because our gluten needs to really kind of activate.

We don't want a cakey bread.

We want an actual nice chewy bread.

(light music and mixing) Actually, there are times when if I walk away from it, the mixer kind of does a little dance, and thank God, I've never walked away long enough, where it's danced and fell off of the counter, but there's a word to the wise.

(light music and mixing) All right.

All right, that, actually, I think is looking really good.

So now what we're gonna do, is we're gonna let the dough rest, and what I have here is a bowl with some olive oil in it, and I'm going to put this dough, clean hands, best tool.

I'm going to actually put this into a bowl, and it helps to kind of coax it out a little bit with the spatula, so I'm gonna put a little oil on the spatula, and, then get our dough into the bowl.

See how, you know, I think you guys can see that it's, it is a, it's a moist dough.

This would be a pretty tricky dough to try and do any sort of kneading on the counter, which is the beauty of not having to do that.

So let me get rid of that here a second.

And now, you just wanna take the dough itself and get it all covered with the olive oil that you put in there, so that that olive oil flavor starts to get imparted, but also so it doesn't stick to your bowl while it's rising.

So here is that.

We're gonna cover it up with a piece of saran wrap, and then you're going to let this sit in a warm area of your kitchen.

It'll probably take about an hour and a half, maybe two hours to rise, but we want it to double in size before we do anything else with our focaccia.

So we're just gonna let our dough rest, and we'll come back, and then we'll, we'll shape it up.

(light music) So this is what our focaccia dough looks like after it has risen for a couple hours, and now we are ready to get it out of the bowl, and we're going to place it into two smaller pans.

Now if you want, you could make one large sized focaccia, but I kind of like separating 'em out into two smaller ones.

So in order to do that, first we want to get some olive oil, a good amount in our pans, and then we're just going to put the dough into the pans and separate it.

I'm just gonna eyeball it half and half.

If you, you know, are wanting to be more exact, by all means weigh it out.

Sometimes I do weigh it out, but for right now, we're just gonna eyeball it.

I also put a little bit of olive oil in my hands, so that the dough doesn't stick while I'm getting it out.

So now we're gonna take this wonderful dough, that is just so nice, and soft, and fluffy, and here it is, I'm going to eyeball half.

It's not the most appealing process, I guess, or aesthetically appealing process, but hey, we're gonna go with it.

And then we're just going to take our hands and start to stretch the dough.

And see, that's another good reason to put some olive oil on your hands, so that the dough doesn't stick.

Now as you can see, this dough is kind of coming back to itself, so that just means that those gluten strands haven't quite relaxed.

You can walk away from it for a few minutes if you want, to give a time to relax, but we're just gonna keep stretching it out.

Now when you separate it into these two pans, a lot of times the dough won't make the sides even, but we're just going to stretch it into a rectangular shape, and get it as far out as we possibly can.

We want the dough probably to be about, I don't know, maybe a half an inch or so in depth there, and as you can see, it's kind of, it's still like slippery, and, and a little bit coming back on me, but I think it's good.

We're getting there, we're getting to the shape we want.

And then we are just going to let this kind of rest.

Now before we put it away, because it's gonna need a second rise here, but before we put it away, let's go ahead and make some dimples.

These aren't gonna stay in necessarily, 'cause we're gonna dimple it again, but I like to put a few dimples in to start it out with, and just kind of let it do its thing.

We can put just a little bit of salt on it at this point.

We'll put more salt on it once we actually get ready to bake it.

But there we go.

We're gonna put this one away, because we're gonna let it set.

If it can rest overnight, that is probably the best thing, because that'll really give the dough a chance to kind of get some flavor, and some really good rise, and just nice, nice texture to it.

But if you only have a few hours, that's okay too.

Just know that maybe the dough won't quite be as flavorful.

So I'm just gonna set this aside for now, and I'm gonna put this guy away, because I'll stretch him out later.

But I wanted to show you, here is the dough that has, I made this last night, so it's been in the refrigerator overnight, and then I took it out about a half an hour ago.

So I let it come to room temperature, I let it rest out of the refrigerator, and now it is ready to finish off for the oven.

Now we're gonna do our bread art thing, but if you're not so inclined to do the bread art piece, what we are going to do just to finish it off, if all you want is some delicious focaccia, is again put our dimples in, and you can see, gosh, you can see the bubbles from the yeast.

It really has a wonderful texture and rise to it, this is a great recipe.

So here's our dimples.

We are going to put a little more, or a lot, depending on what you wanna do, olive oil on top.

I have a brush here, so I'm just gonna kind of brush it around.

You want those dimples, and then hands are a great way to do it too, but you want those dimples to have some olive oil in it.

Don't be shy.

If you need to get some more olive oil into those dimples, then by all means, but it gives it flavor when you get ready to put it into the oven, and it also then, you know, helps to keep the dough nice and moist and flavorful.

So there we have our dimples with the oil in it, and now we're going to add more flaky sea salt.

And you know, whether you're decorating, or whether you're just going with it straight like this, you're gonna put your flaky sea salt on.

So we get some sea salt over the top.

You know, if you'd like you can chop up some rosemary, you can chop up some thyme, whatever herb is your favorite, and you can put that on up of the bread as well.

And then once that is done, if you're just making it plain, you're gonna put it in a 450 degree preheated oven, and you're gonna let it cook for about 15, 20 minutes.

But for us, we're gonna move on to the decorating piece.

So now we're going to do what I think is the most fun part, and that is decorate our focaccia.

For me, it is really the most creative piece of baking the bread, and not only does it add a lot of flavor, but it really adds a wow factor.

It starts with going to the grocery store, and picking out all of the things that you think, you know, hey, this is gonna look good as grass, this is gonna look good as a flower.

I mean, there are just so many different things to make your bread unique to you, and delicious.

So what we have here, what I found in the grocery store when I went the other day, was some green onions, some asparagus, I have little mini bell peppers that I sliced long ways, I have mushrooms, these are pepperoni, a little bit of prosciutto, green olives that I've halved.

These are, and I just discovered this just the other day, these are little miniature red onions.

I didn't know there was such a thing, so I sliced some of those up.

They make really cool flowers.

And then we just have baby tomatoes, and here are more mini sweet bell peppers.

Only for these guys, I cut them crossways instead of long ways, so you can make little flower decorations in a different design, using the same red bell peppers, and orange, and yellow.

All right, so all of that, let's just show you some of the basics of how to even get started with this.

So the first thing I do, and remember now, we've already dimpled our bread, we've already put olive oil in our dimples, and you can see the olive oil in the dimples, we've already put some flaky sea salt on.

So our next step really is to frame out our flowers, and everyone is a little bit different, and you can certainly do your own thing, but what I like to do is just kind of start with the stems.

So you're, I'm going to put asparagus here as one stem.

I like it to kind of curve, so it looks actually like the stem of a flower.

I'm going to, probably in the center, take one of my longer green onions, maybe make that a center stem, and you really have to kind of push fairly firmly in, so that it gets to stick in the dough.

And then, I always like to have, you know, you just don't want, I mean, in kindergarten I remember making little flowers that had one little line and a couple leaves.

We wanna do a little bit something more than that, so we're going to some little offshoot stems, and I took another little piece of green onion, and I'm just going to kind of place that like that.

I'm going to take another piece of green onion, and you know, sometimes it, you don't have the right size, so all we have to do here is get our cutting board, and gosh, get a knife.

Just a second guys.

(light music and metal clanging) Ah, there we go.

All right, see, you never know.

Mise en place, I should've had my knife out.

So here we go.

I'm just going to slice this green onion, and get a little smaller stem that's a little more pliable, and I'm going to place it on the other side of my green onion, like that.

And then I think on the far side here, we'll just do another asparagus stem.

So that kind of gives you a structure, that kind of gets you started.

Now it's, what else do we wanna do?

One of the things that I did wanna show you, because I just was playing around the other night, and figured this out, and I was like so proud of myself that I thought, well, I wanna show everyone.

I have these little pepperonis, and I was trying to figure out, how can I make a little floral rosette with pepperonis?

So this is what I did.

I, let's put our onion away, put our knife to the side.

So I just took my pepperonis, and I laid them kind of overlapping, but with a scallopy edge, and take as many as you like, you can take, if you want small, you can do maybe three.

If you want something a little bit larger, like I am here, you can take five, and then all you need to do, once they're all laid out, is just start to roll the edges, and you roll it all up, and trust me, they will all stick together.

And then, so you have this roll, I'm just going to cut it in half like this, and then as you see here, you have the start of a little rosette, or a little flower like that, and then I am going to just place this here on my bread.

And then you can come kind of play with it a little bit, and fan it out a little bit more, but isn't that just the cutest thing?

I love that.

So let's take it, our other half here.

We're gonna do the same thing.

We're just kind of spreading our leaves out and pinching it.

And sometimes if you pinch it down at the bottom, you can spread it out even more, but then place it on your focaccia, and spread it out.

And look at that, I love it.

If you guys can see that.

I mean, I just think that that is gorgeous.

So there are many different things that we can do with all of these different vegetables, and I wanna just show you one other really cool thing here.

So these little mini red onions, see how they kind of have their little lines that go in between the different layers of the onion.

Well those will look beautiful as they cook up, so I'm just going to take one of these, and I am going to make this one of my little flowers, and I think I'm just going to put the pointy side out, but I have several here, as you can see, and I'm just going to maybe put three of these guys along this asparagus, but then you can fill in the sides with a little color.

And so I have just the end edges of my, my little red onion, and I'm just putting them all around.

Here's one more.

Ooh, that's a pretty one.

But there we go.

We have this, and now you have a darling little flower here.

The only other thing that I'm gonna show you, before I just kind of finish this up, is here I have little green olives.

Green olives like this that are halved make awesome leaves.

And to make things look a little bit more realistic, you always wanna have some leaves on your flowers, right?

So just place some green olives anywhere you'd like, and maybe even take, this is rosemary, take a few of the rosemary stems, and place it in between like some of your, your flower petals, or, you know, wherever you feel nature might put some greenery, and just have fun with it.

Be as creative as you like, because at the end of the day it's gonna be delicious, no matter what it turns out looking like, and every one is like your own piece of art.

It really is awesome.

The thing too to keep in mind, once you get all of your vegetables, and your meats, and whatever all you are putting on your focaccia bread, before you stick it in the oven, it is really important to take some more olive oil, and make sure you cover all of those vegetables, and all of those meats very well with your olive oil, otherwise they will burn up in the oven, and nobody wants that.

So, I'm just taking my olive oil, I'm putting it over my veggies, and then I probably will add just a little more salt to it, but then it goes in the oven, 450, 15 to 20 minutes, and when it comes out, we'll put a little more olive oil on top, and we'll be ready to eat.

(light music) So I just wanted to show you the finished product.

I've taken some of the prosciutto, the green peppers, and red peppers, and everything, and created the design.

So I'm just gonna put our finishing olive oil onto everything.

Remember, we have to coat it really well so that it doesn't burn.

And so we're just getting it all over, don't worry about putting too much on.

It's focaccia, I don't know if you can.

I guess you could put too much on, but we're not, we're not worried about that at this point.

And here we are.

I'm gonna put just a little more salt over, not a lot, because I just don't want it to be overwhelmingly salty, but the salt will give it a lot of extra flavor.

And there we have it, you guys.

Your finished focaccia bread art, ready to go into the oven.

And I know I've told you before, but I'll say it one more time, 450, 15 to 20 minutes.

When it comes out of the oven, brush it again with some olive oil, and you'll be ready to enjoy.

It is really best the same day, but if you do have leftovers, you can wrap it up, refrigerate it, and just heat it up right before you serve it again.

Enjoy.

So here's our beautiful bread right out of the oven, with its last little bit of olive oil covering.

All that's left now is to cut this baby, and give it a try.

So I'm just going to, let's see, I think let's slice it right down the middle here, and get a nice big piece so you can see the inside of the bread itself as well.

So here we have it guys.

Ooh, so you can see the structure of the bread itself.

It's light, and there's some air pockets in there.

And okay, here we go.

Going in.

Mm.

You have got to try this recipe.

There's a hint of this salt from all of the flaky sea salt that we included.

It's a soft bread with a crunchy outside.

The toppings are delicious.

I really do hope you try this recipe soon.

(light music)