Welcome to Monday morning everyone. Who knew Focaccia Bread could be an art form. I’m a big Pinterest fan and ran across examples of folks who had decorated their focaccia bread with really pretty garden-style designs. I have to admit I had only made focaccia bread once before and that was in a bread class where we made several different types of bread. I knew it wasn’t particularly hard but had just not tried it since.
I researched recipes and found the perfect recipe (I thought) and decided to plunge in and try my hand. I’ll be giving you a sep-by-step recipe blog for this later on but today…just the overview.
After assembling the ingredients I had to figure out the design. I am a stick figure kind of artist so this was quite the challenge. Plus I had a limited amount of vegetables in the fridge and I didn’t want to have to shop.
You can see in the above picture how I laid out the design in the pan prior to assembling it on the bread dough. The recipe called for “squished” tomatoes. That’s why the tomatoes look, well….squished. I used small peppers cut horizontally and some scallion stalks for the stems. I also added basil leaves and parsley leaves to the design on the bread dough.
This is what it looked like before going into the oven. I was really quite taken with it and hoped it would turn out.
After baking it still looked pretty good. The focaccia bread was wonderful. It had a super crisp bottom , side and top crust and a very tender interior. The flavor was excellent and the herbs sprinkled on the dough blended with the salt and olive oil to make a really tasty bread.
Here’s a closer look. You can see how golden the top turned out. The vegetables were a great addition in terms of flavor and looks. I will be trying this again and will share the recipe with you. You will absolutely love the finished product.