Wednesday 17 June 2009

Prosciutto and focaccia.

Hello there!

It has been quite a while since I last wrote here. I do have a couple of ideas that have been circling around my mind for the past few months, but I never seem to have the time or energy to sit down and think about actually writing them up.

Now this post is about food, as you may have guessed from the title. First, let me show you a photo of yummy starter bits I made for the boy and myself a while back. They're nothing overly special, but I thought they looked nice and they tasted amazing! I shall call them
Tomato-Mozzarella-Prosciutto wrappers. Isn't that a nice name? Here they are: I very simply made them by wrapping bits of fresh mozzarella, cherry tomatoes and basil in prosciutto slices. I found these awesome slices slices of prociutto in our local Asda. In fact, they were Asda branded too. They were half the size of the normal slices, and thus, perfect for these little finger food bits.

The main thing I was going to blabber on about in this post is the MOST AWESOME olive focaccia I made yesterday. I did it according to a recipe I had on a dish cloth (yes, a CLOTH!) and I was so so happy with the way it turned out. My mum sent me the cloth over a year ago now and I've not used it as a cloth because I thought I really should try baking that focaccia, just never felt like doing it. Well, now I have and I've written down the recipe and am using the cloth for wiping purposes. In case you're interested, here is the designer's home page, sadly, it's only in Finnish.
Anyway, on to the recipe.

Olive Focaccia


Ingredients:

1 litre of plain wheat flour

1 bag of dried yeast (I used a Finnish standard yeast, which had 11 grams in a bag. Most UK yeast has been 7 grams, so about 1 ½ bags of that stuff.)
1 teaspoon of salt

1 tablespoon of honey

approx. 3 ½ desilitre of water (NB. about 42 degrees warm to wake up the yeast)
½ desilitre of olive oil
handful of pitted olives

sea salt


The How To:

Mix flour, yeast, salt and honey together.

Add water (remember the temperature!) and olive oil and mix to make a nice dough.

Let the dough rise under a cover (I tend to use a kitchen towel/ pillow case, whatever is clean when baking) for an hour.
Dump the dough on an oiled baking tray and tap it to about ½ an inch thick thing. Let it rise for another 30 mins under a cover.

Press the olives (the original recipe says black olives, but I prefer green so used them) on the dough and springle sea salt on it.
Bake in 180 degrees for about 20-30 mins.

And behold! You've just made yourself a focaccia. It wasn't difficult at all now, was it?

The boy and I ate about half of the focaccia on it's own (although he picked out his olives and I ate them) freshly made last night. The other half we had for lunch today. We filled it with lettuce (rocket would've been nice, but we had romaine so settled for that) prosciutto, tomatoes and mozzarella. It was well yummy. Here's a pic. Byebye.