Olive and basil focaccia

This is very much a “day at home” thing as the dough requires three rises of about 45 minutes. But it’s basically: mix the dough, roll it out about three hours later, smash and apply the topping ingredients, put in the oven. Just think of all the washing and action-movie watching you can do in the meantime!

About the flour - regular, all-purpose flour has about 8% protein. Bread-making, or strong, flour has 12% or more. Think of the wheat protein (gluten) as the scaffolding of your bread. Once you get the bread to rise, the scaffolding will hold the shape so it remains soft and fluffy and doesn’t collapse back down.

Ingredients

Bread

• 600g bread-making flour
• 360g filtered water
• 1 sachet dry yeast (7 grams)
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

Topping

• Handful fresh basil leaves
• .25 cup extra virgin olive oil
• 3 cloves garlic
• 4 pitted kalamata olives

Method

In a mixing bowl, combine the bread ingredients. Kneed just enough to combine the ingredients into a consistent ball of dough. Cover with damp tea towel and set aside in warm place (or in the oven at 40ºC) for 45 minutes.

Now it will have doubled in size. Wet your working surface, and with wet hands stretch and fold the dough four or five times. Cover, and set aside in a warm place for another 45 minutes.

A good size baking pan for this is 20cm wide by 30cm long and at least 5cm deep.

Oil the pan bottom and sides.

Smash the topping ingredients using a mortar and pestle.

Now dry and lightly flour your working surface. With a rolling pin, shape the dough to match, more or less, the shape of you baking tin.

Place in the tin and push and stretch the dough to reach the sides of the tin, then and cover with the topping, smoothing across evenly with the back of a spoon. Now you want to make little indentations in the dough for texture. You do this with the fingers of both hands, like you’re playing the piano, working all the way down from the far side to the near side.

Cover again and return to warm place for another 45 mins.

Remove from oven (if this is your warm place) and crank up the heat to 200ºC. Once the temperature is reached, remove the damp towel and place the tin in the oven.

After 12 minutes, turn it around for more even browning and bake for another 12 minutes.

Once done, it needs to rest on a wire rack so the bottom doesn’t get soggy. To safely remove it from the hot tin, use the double-wire-rack flip technique.

Place the hot baking tin on a wire rack. Put another rack on top. Hold the two racks together with the tin in the middle, and flip. Take off the top wire rack and carefully remove the upside down hot tin. The bottom of the loaf will now be revealed, all golden brown. Put the wire rack upside down on top, and flip again.

And there it is - resting on a wire rack.

Before serving, sprinkle with grated Parmesan and a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil.