Focaccia bread

Focaccia always sounds like fancy bread. The type of fancy bread you only get in a fancy Italian place so they only give you a tiny square to whet you appetite. It's too fancy to be your regular table bread, because who do we think we are? Royalty? Well since we are in quarantine and I have been lucky enough to score a bag of yeast - let's bring this awesome fancy shmancy stuff to my everyday dinner table, shall we?

When you look into it, it's not entirely hard to do. The only time consuming step is when you wait for the dough to rise. During a regular week day I don't really have an hour just to wait around for the dough, so it's best saved as a weekend thing to do. Somewhere I read you can make the dough the night before and leave it in the fridge.. I don't know because that's too cold for the yeast cells to rise the dough... So start this guy like on a mid afternoon on Sunday, go water your garden while you wait on the dough, do the laundry, go do a few jumping jacks, or go play chase with your dog for a bit - whatever. An hour passes by pretty quickly and we're good to go.

What you need:
- 2 3/4 cup of flour
- 1 tsp salt
- 1 tsp sugar
- 1 tbsp dry yeast
- 1 tsp of garlic powder
- 2 tsp of dried oregano
- 1 tsp of dried thyme
- 2 tsp of dried rosemary
- ground fresh black pepper
- 1 cup warm water
- 4 tbsp of olive oil
- 1/4 cup of Parmesan cheese

Recipe:
- marinate herbs and olive oil in a small bowl.
- mix flour, yeast, salt, sugar, yeast, garlic powders, black pepper, half of herb oil mix, and warm water together into a dough ball. Cover with Saran wrap and let it sit in room temperature for an hour. This will allow the dough to rise so you set the soft texture inside while crunchy outside.
- after an hour's past, take the dough ball out and kneed it on a lightly flour dusted surface. use a rolling pin or just your fingers to stretch the dough into a flat surface. Let it sit and rise for another 20-30 min. You know what? right now it's perfect timing to go pre-heat your oven, and make a side dish to go with this baby.
- Rub some olive oil on a baking tin and put the dough in the tin, this is to prevent sticking. Keep stretching the dough to the shape/size of the baking ware. My bake ware was roughly 10 x 12 inches.
- Rub the remainder of your herb oil mix on top of the focaccia. Remember this is been marinating for the past hour, mmmmm! Sprinkle some Parmesan on top. bake at 450 F for about 15 min. I put the broiler on for another 2-3 m just to toast the top.
- Serve with.. anything you want! Salad is great with it, saucy dishes are great with it, or if you want to fancy it up more, mussels with wine sauce!

Notes:
- I added some chili sprinkles just to make it a bit spicy. You can forgo this if you like it without.
- What made this recipe better was to soak the olive oil with the Italian herbs in it. This way the oil becomes infused with the flavor which is pretty awesome. I used the infused oil to rub on top of the bread to it's extra herb-y.
- I made an error while making this bread this time so I'm going to share it so you won't have to deal with it. The bake tin I have is stainless steel as I'm trying to not to have bakeware and cookware that's coated with Teflon. The salt in bread may cause your bakeware wear down pre-maturely. You might want to use a layer of parchment paper, or a glass bakeware perhaps. The trouble with parchment paper is that it can only withstand heat up to 420-430F, and glass heats up slower usually. Just be careful of your bakeware and bake lining so nothing burns, because no body like carcinogens.

Original inspiration was from here: https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/17918/focaccia-bread/