If I remember correctly, only one person got this Technical Challenge right on the GBBO. This is Paul Hollywood’s Focaccia. It looks simple enough but the dough was tricky to work with. Take 500g bread flour, add 2 sachets of instant yeast and salt. Add 2 tbsp olive oil and 300ml cool water. Make a dough. Slowly add another 100ml water to the dough. This water made the dough, wet and lumpy. It really looked like a disaster. Anyway, we kept stretching and folding with a bit of oil on our hands until it looked a bit better. Then we kneaded as normal. Hey, presto! We had a smooth, light dough. We covered it and let it rise for about 2 hours.
We cut it in half and put one half in a bag in the freezer. The other half was pressed into a 30cm x 20cm baking tin, which we don’t have here, so we used the next size up.
The recipe said to leave it to rise uncovered. I don’t think that was a great idea as it formed a skin and didn’t rise very much in almost 2 hours. Sprinkle with olive oil and sea salt. Bake at 220C/425F for 25 minutes. I checked at 20 minutes and it was well done. It didn’t look that good but we cut it open anyway.
Surprisingly, it looked pretty good inside. We grabbed some balsamic vinegar, olive oil and some cheese and dug in. It tasted really delicious! It was light and spongy.
I think we would make this again because we really like these kinds of meals. It was way better than store bought focaccia even though we thought it hadn’t risen very much. I would maybe make it into a smaller shape and cover it for at least half of the second rise.
Happy baking!
Cheryl and Becky
Life with Becky 
Oh it really does look perfect! I love focaccia bread:)
Thank you, Divya. We don’t eat it very often, but this recipe might just change that 🙂
This looks very tasty! I get really frustrated with bread mixes as they never rise properly for me and I’m too impatient with all the rising time 🙂
I could not get bread to rise in England. I think the cold and damp make it difficult. Someone told me to put the dough to rise in the oven with the oven light on. So far it has worked well. Also, check the yeast package. I was using water that was cooler than recommended. A couple of tips made all the difference 🙂
I’ll pop over to yours and try it! I’m a rubbish cook 🙂 🙂
That would be fun! Come on over there’s always lots 🙂