Um, yum. Focaccia (#13)

First of all, I'm not sure I could go as far as Nicole (Pinch my salt) and put this one above casatiello, but man, this is some amazingly yummy bread!

Pretty simple to make, too. I mixed up everything in my KA (#1 because it's incredibly wet sticky dough and #2 because I was (as always) multi-tasking and dealing with the kiddos at the same time as baking...shhhh, don't tell Peter!) and then dumped it out onto the counter.

I was a little nervous with the similarity of this recipe to the ciabatta (especially the fact that they're both super wet sticky doughs). The stretch-and-fold part of the ciabatta did not go well for me; in fact, if you recall, I actually gave up on that method and switched to another and...yeah. But this time, on examining the stretch-and-fold picture, I realized what I was doing wrong. Instead of stretching the dough out to try to lengthen it, I pulled the dough up and it totally worked! I was able to do the stretch-and-fold successfully three times!

Time consuming, but overall a pretty easy process. Then I had to dump 1/4 cup oil on the pan before putting the bread on it. And then I poured another 1/4+ cup of herb oil on top of the bread. I didn't have any fresh herbs, so I just used dried: parsley, basil, oregano, kosher salt, freshly ground black pepper. Oh my: the smell! Yum.

I used my fingers to dimple the bread and push it out to the sides of the pan. I didn't feel like mine looked as dimpled as in the book, but hubby said it was just their lighting. Anyway, into the fridge for an overnight rest. I took it out today and let it rise for three hours (totally enough time for another trip to the zoo!).

Into the oven for 15 minutes - and voila! Perfection! Seriously, this is the first time in the Challenge when I felt like my texture and crumb were exactly what they were supposed to be! Check it out: