Garlic, Chili & Herb Focaccia (Book of Bread) | Recipe

Still going with One Recipe a Week project, we have been diving into different cookbooks. For Jupiter’s birthday, fellow blogger Claire bought her the National Trust Book of Bread by Jane Eastoe. This cookbook is all about the art of making bread, complete with beautiful, had drawn and watercolour images of the various breads that you can make. The first few chapters explain differences between raising agents, flours, techniques, tools, terms used when baking bread and more before throwing you into baking. Once you have a bit of an understanding of how to make bread, the book itself is split into different sections; Quick Breads, Basic Breads, Fancy Breads, Regional Breads and then Breads from Around the World.

We quite liked how Book of Bread was categorized, as we could see some breads from within England or jump to Fancy Breads that would be a showstopper. It’s a very clever idea when having a cookbook dedicated to one specific thing – and something that makes a lot of sense in the way that it is split. We chose the Wild Garlic Focaccia to try out, but due to ingredient limitation, we have adapted the recipe to be our own.

Print Recipe

Wild Garlic Focaccia (with Chili)

Course: Side Dish

Keyword: bread

Ingredients

• 5 g Salt
• 350 g Strong Bread Flour*
• 7 g Dried Yeast
• 60 ml Olive Oil + more to drizzle
• 200 ml Water
• 1 handful Rosemary Fresh, Chopped
• 30 g Wild Garlic**
• 2 Chili Peppers Optional

Instructions

• Add salt, flour, yeast, 3 tablespoons of the Olive oil and water into a large mixing bowl.
• Stir together until a dough starts to come together, then start kneading for 10 minutes.
• Take the garlic cloves and chili peppers and add them to a food processor. You can keep the seeds of the chili peppers in, and pulse them until finely chopped.
• Add the garlic and chili mixture as well as the rosemarry to the dough and kneed until the dough is fully incorporated.
• Add another tablespoon of olive oil into a clean bowl and put the dough into it, ensuring the dough is coated in a bit of oil as well.
• Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let rise for an hour to an hour and a half – the dough should double in size.
• Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and shape into a flattened circle.
• Move the dough onto a baking sheet and cover with plastic again for another hour, to let it rise.
• Pre-heat the oven to 220 degrees Celsius.
• After the bread has sat for that last hour, lightly press down on the bread in various places with your finger, creating small dips in the bread.
• Drizzle some olive oil on top and sprinkle with salt.
• Bake in the oven for 15 minutes or until the bread is golden on top.

Notes

* We were out of bread flour and just used plain flour in this recipe.

**We used regular garlic, in the same amount, as wild garlic was out of season.

Apart from adaptations we needed to do, due to ingredients not being available, we also added chili peppers to our bread. This focaccia came out pretty good, though it could have used more chili for our liking. The bread itself looked really nice and tasted good with a bit of butter or dipped in balsamic / olive oil blend. It’s a fun bread to make that doesn’t take too long, and with the chili, garlic and rosemary, your house is sure to smell amazing.

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