8. Courgette and Rosemary Focaccia

For the dough:
500g strong white bread flour
5g powdered yeast
10g fine salt
325ml warm water
1 tbsp olive oil

For the topping:
A generous drizzle of olive oil
A sprinkle of rock salt
A couple of rosemary twigs, leaves stripped
A few slithers of courgette, thinly sliced with a peeler

Mix the flour, yeast, salt and water in a bowl to form a sticky dough. Add the oil, mix it in then turn the dough out onto a clean work surface. Knead until smooth and silky, about ten minutes.

Shape the dough into a ball and coat with a little extra oil. Leave to rise in a clean bowl covered with a plastic bag. When it has doubled in size, top it onto the work surface and press into a rough rectangle. Place in a lightly oiled shallow baking tray, measuring about 26x36cm. Press the dough in with your fingers, right into the corners, then leave to rise covered for about half an hour. Pre-heat the oven to 250C (or as high as it will go).

When the bread looks puffed up and airy use your finger tips to poke deep holes across the whole surface, almost to the bottom. Place small-ish torn off pieces of courgette into the wholes and poke in. Drizzle the top generously, but not swimmingly, with olive oil and sprinkle with salt and rosemary. Bake for about ten minutes then turn the oven down to about 200C and bake for a further ten minutes.


I'm getting a bit ahead of myself with this 52 recipe thing, i've already done two months worth and have another one lined up for Saturday night! The dough for this recipe is from a lovely little book called 'Bread' by Daniel Stevens. It's the third in the 'River Cottage Handbook' series and i can't recommend it enough!

I decided on courgette and rosemary as a topping following it's success on the top of some pizza earlier in the week. Plus i had the courgette leftover, so it was using something up! I also prepared the courgette during the day and left it in a bowl with the olive oil and rosemary sprigs that i'd be using for the toppings, so things could start mingling flavours.

All-in-all i'm fairly chuffed with how it turned out for my first focaccia attempt. I do think i could have left it to rise more once it was in the baking tray; i'd panicked myself with images of an overflown doughy mess as i was leaving it for longer than half an hour while i went out, so left it in a cooler place which i think impaired the rising too much. Also the oven only goes up to 220C so i just left it on that temperature for the full 20 mins (possibly slightly longer) and it came out fine.

Definitely going to be making this again, probably with great frequency!