My First Focaccia

I finally made my first focaccia bread. Hubby had attempted to make one long time ago but I vaguely remembered that it wasn’t very successful. Focaccia is an Italian flat oven-baked bread which may be topped with herbs and is widely available here. But there’s no beating the satisfaction of eating bread made by your own hands. Plus, with the food scare currently raging in China and Singapore, anything homemade is definitely doing you and your family a favour.


In fact, I was even going to use our home-grown rosemary herb for this bread, except that after sighting the infancy of the plant, still barely 10cm tall, I really should leave it to grow a little longer before harvesting.


Recipes are abundant all over the internet, but I decided to fall back on my favourite ‘Happy Home Baker’. However, I followed the original recipe and used 1/3 wholemeal flour and 2/3 bread flour. In addition to its higher nutritional value, I’m beginning to like the taste of wholemeal bread after coming to Australia. I don’t know why, but my only impression of wholemeal bread in Singapore was its dry texture. However, after trying out the wholemeal bread from Baker’s Taste here, I’m converted. Thus, I’ve purchased a kilo of wholemeal flour to add into my baking whenever possible.


One of our mutual friend from Singapore came over for dinner tonight. He’s a cabin crew and also Hubby’s ex-army buddy. He’ll be laying over in Melbourne for one night. The menu for the night was Neapolitan Pork Steaks with the Rosemary focaccia and rockets salad. I doubled the quantity of the focaccia recipe to make 2 loaves so that everyone can eat as much as he likes.




The kneading was supposed to take about 7mins but because of the huge quantity of flour, my poor mixer could not reach the bottom of the dough very well. I held it as it kneaded but still.... Also, the dough “looks dry”, according to Hubby. Thanks to his comment, I added a little more water to the dough. That’s my mistake. DO RESIST the temptation to add more water until all the flour is incorporated and you should touch it to decide if it’s dry, not just by looks! The dough now became very wet and sticky, thus after kneading for the longest time, I decided to take out one lump to add more flour and knead manually. Hubby also came in to help with the kneading. Finally, 2 hours after I first started the bread project and a substantial amount of flour later, we finally allowed the focaccia dough to rest and rise.


I was so afraid it wouldn’t rise properly after all the excessive kneading and extra flour. But thank God it did ‘rise to the occasion’ and pretty quickly too. After it doubled in size and when you press the dough and it doesn’t spring back, it’s ready to be punched for the 2nd rise.


The 2nd rise was beautiful as well and I’m beginning to be very hopeful about this bread. Not to mention the aroma of the rosemary! Finally, I poked the dough with my finger and distributed the rosemary on top. Then I sprinkled sea salt all over and drizzled more olive oil before sending it to the oven. My oven was big enough to accommodate both pans of bread at one go, so there’s economy of scale in terms of electricity usage and time.


25 minutes later, the breads were done and though I meant to keep the bread till the guest came, I couldn’t resist cutting out some for tasting. It was fantastic! Thank God all the additional flour and kneading did not create any damage to the bread. We couldn’t taste the garlic though. Not sure if I didn’t use enough or maybe because it wasn’t freshly chopped. (They were pre-chopped and kept in the fridge for convenience.) But the salt! My God, they were really unnecessary. I don’t know why the recipe calls for the salt to be added, the bread tasted very good on its own! It was so salty that we had to knock out all the rock salt crystals from the top before eating. So if you’re gonna follow this recipe, you can ignore the sea salt or just sprinkle in moderation.


I can’t wait to make my next wholemeal loaf! I’m also trying to find some biscuits or cake recipes that use oats. I think they’re a good way to introduce some oats into the kids’ diet. With homemade cookies or biscuits, we can also cut down on those that we purchase outside. While I cannot totally avoid buying processed food, it’s the least I can do to ensure some quality control. Nowadays, I’m rather weary when buying groceries. Who knows what strange things they’ll discover added to our food next?