Few foods can top the smell or taste of freshly baked bread. But making it yourself is often time-consuming and requires skill if you don’t have a bread machine. And most of us don’t have a local bakery where we can pick up delicious bread at any time. Enter Blitz Bread – an easy recipe for a focaccia bread that takes 10 minutes or less of hands-on time. With this recipe, you can go from the mixing bowl to the table in less than two hours. And did I mention you don’t even have to knead it?! Just a good stand mixer will do.
I’m not going to reprint the recipe here. You should go the the Blitz Bread recipe page to get it. But I’ll share some notes with you after making it myself.
You’ll find a lot of helpful hints, pictures, and ideas on this page. Here are my tips:
- The recipe calls for 1 tablespoon of instant yeast. If you only have active dry yeast, use two packets (or 4 1/2 teaspoons) and make sure you proof it first. Proofing just means that you dissolve the yeast in some of the warm water that you’ll be using for the recipe along with a little flour. Give it 10 minutes and see if it’s bubbly. If not, throw it out and use some different yeast (because the stuff you had is dead).
- You can substitute your own flavors for the optional ingredients of pizza dough flavor, cheese powder, and pizza seasoning. For example, I made a rosemary garlic parmesan focaccia bread with 1 tablespoon of garlic powder, 1 tablespoon of rosemary leaves, and 1/4 cup of grated parmesan in the batter. I topped it before baking with a drizzle of olive oil and a sprinkling of rosemary leaves, parmesan, and kosher salt. But this is a versatile recipe, so try your own combination if you want. Next on my list is a sun-dried tomato and basil combination.
- Make sure you have a good mixer, because this is a tough dough to mix. It’ll kill your little wimpy hand mixer in no time, and I wouldn’t want to mix it by hand. It bogged down our KitchenAid Artisan mixer, which is pretty heavy duty.
- Make sure you give your pan a good coating of vegetable oil spray or shortening before you drizzle olive oil in the bottom. I didn’t spray enough and it stuck a little on me. I was still able to save the loaf intact though.
- Expect the dough to be very sticky. It’s normal. Just put some oil or spray on your hands before putting it in the pan or poking it prior to baking.
- Make sure you turn the bread out of the pan five minutes after you bring it out of the oven. If you don’t, the bottom will get soggy.
- It makes great sandwiches! (But it’s good by itself, too!)
I really want to encourage you to try this recipe – especially if you’ve never baked bread before or if you’ve always had problems baking bread. It’s extremely delicious, extremely easy, and hard to mess up. It doesn’t take much time either, and I’m sure you’ll enjoy the results.
Try it out for yourself and let me know how it turned out for you! I’m especially interested in different flavor combinations, so let me know if you’ve got some good ideas.
