How To Make Focaccia

Today, I'm going to show you how to make focaccia. Here we've got 500 grams of strong flour. I have 325 mil of water (tepid water).

I've got 15 grams of fresh yeast (but you could use a sachet of 7 grams of dried yeast). I've got 2 teaspoons of salt and I'm going to put in two tablespoons of olive oil. So, to start away, I'm going to put the dry ingredients in first.

So, the salt goes into the flour. If you were using dried yeast, that goes into the flower as well. Then I'm going to mix my yeast into the water.

If the water is hand-hot, you shouldn't be able to sense it - whether it's cold water or hot water. Just tepid is fine. And then, all that water is going to be poured into the flour - all in one go.

Into that, I'm going to put roughly two tablespoons of olive oil. That's a good extra virgin olive oil as well! Then, using the rounded edge of a dough scraper, I'm just going to blend the liquid into the flour. You can turn the bowel with one hand and push the liquid into the flour with the other.

Now, I can't really use the dough scraper any more so you can put that to one side, but I can put my hand into the bowl. So, there we are, we have left the bowl clean. We can now knead the dough.

In order to knead the dough, you need to put your full body weight into it, really. Push the dough out so you're stretching out those strands of gluten. Fold it over to trap the air in and turn it.

Just those three simple movements: stretch, fold and turn. So I'm just about finishing kneading this dough now. I'll know it's done if it becomes springy and elastic and it bounces back to the touch like that, see? Now, it's done.

I'm going to chafe it, which is this movement here, move your hands underneath the ball and if you really put effort into it, you can feel it in your biceps as you are really cupping the dough like this and stretching out the top of it, because this will be the top of your focaccia. So I want that to be nice and smooth on top, and I want all the crevices underneath to go away. Pick up your ball with the nice soft top there, and really turn it over and wash its face in the oil.

Bring it back up to the surface again so the whole thing is covered with oil and that'll stop it from getting a crust. It also means you can literally pour it out of the bowl later, so do be generous with that extra virgin olive oil. Now, I'm going to cover the bowl with cling-film and leave it to rise.

This could be three fourths of an hour to an hour, this depends on the heat of your hous, but you want to find a draft-free area that's quite warm but not too hot to leave your dough to double in volume. Right! So, the focaccia has been rising for about an hour in a warm kitchen, and I can see that it's doubled in size and there are some lovely air bubbles in the top here so that means it's had enough air in it from the beginning. What I'm going to do is just take a little oil from the bowl and get it on to the tray so that you grease the tray under where the focaccia is going to sit.

It only needs to be oval-shaped like this. Now, what I can do is slide the dough out of the bowl up on to the tray like this. Any extra oil can always be used on top of the focaccia.

Wow, look at this big bubble, here! What you can do is stretch it from underneath, pull it out a little bit to get it bigger but never on top because what I want to do is keep that beautiful rounded edge here. Then, just using my fingertips only, you can push them into the focaccia and that gives that typical sort of dimpled finish that a focaccia should have. I'm going to put some rosemary on it.

You can put some olives on it, you can put some cherry tomatoes, or squeeze some half cherry tomatoes on it. I quite like the traditional one with rosemary. Whatever flavorings you use on a focaccia, you must make sure you push the flavorings down into the dough.

That way, the flavor goes into the dough a