Focaccia di Formaggio (Cheese Focaccia)

Holidays have passed and autumn is upon us, much to my delight. With the changing of the season, this blog will hopefully try and move with it, however there are always those summer recipes you can't help but make, even during winter! This is one of them. Despite it being perfect for autumn and winter too (win win), this cheesy focaccia brings memories of sunny days in Italy.

The recipe is from my favourite two greedy Italian's book, Two Greedy Italians Eat Italy. My version has turned out very different from theirs, as it seemed to rise A LOT and theirs was more like pizza. Although, focaccia is usually more like the appearance of mine, so I don't mind! I've also used two types of cheese.. i'm greedy like that! Sono golosa!

Ingredients

1kg plain flour

500ml water

100ml olive oil + extra

10g yeast (I used the fast acting kind - they suggest fresh)

20g salt

400g taleggio cheese and comte, roughly chopped(both can be found in Waitrose)

Method

1. Put the flour into a large bowl and make a well in the centre.

2. Add the oil, yeast and salt and mix to form a rough dough. Knead in a mixer with the dough hook for 5 minutes (hand 20 minutes) until smooth and elastic. You can do the window test to see if it's ready, by taking a piece of dough, stretching it and seeing if you can see through the thinnest part without it breaking.

3. Cover with a cloth and leave to rise. I put mine in a warm oven that I turned off, as I don't have many places in my kitchen that seems to work for dough. It didn't take long to rise in their, but in a normal warm place, it should take 30 minutes.

4. Pre-heat oven to 240 degrees.

5. Grease a round pizza tray with a small bit of olive oil.

6. Roll half the dough on a lightly floured surface with a rolling pin. By hand, stretch the dough to a thickness of 3mm. Imagine you are making pizza!

7. Place on the tray and top with the cheese pieces

8. Roll and stretch the other half of the dough to the same size and thickness, and place over the other half with the cheese. Press down the sides like you're crimping a pasty. Drizzle over some oil.

9. Bake in a hot oven for 15 minutes or until nice and brown. Best served straight away.