Easy focaccia

This bread has good flavor, but is basic enough to use like French bread. I make it frequently since we no longer live near a bakery. The dough is very sticky. I make it with the dough cycle of my bread machine, but mixing it with a stand mixer would work just as well; if you make it by hand, you may need more flour.

Focaccia

1 ½ c water
1 ½ Tb olive oil
3 ¾ c. bread flour
1 ½ tsp salt
1 ½ Tb sugar
1 ½ tsp yeast
olive oil, as desired for greasing the pan and drizzling on top
freshly ground pepper to taste
fleur de sel or other flaky sea salt, to taste

Place all ingredients in the machine and run the dough setting. This takes almost 1 hour, 50 minutes with my machine, ending with the completion of the first rise.

Grease a half sheet pan with olive oil. Place the dough on the pan and stretch it more or less to the edges of the pan, then dimple it with the tips of your fingers. (If it springs back and you’d like it thinner, after the initial stretching, let it rest covered for 10 minutes to relax the gluten, then stretch it more.) Cover the dough loosely with a towel or plastic wrap and let rise again, anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour, depending on your patience and the room temperature. The less it rises, the denser it will be; the longer it rises – to a point – the more big air bubbles it will have.

Remove the cover and drizzle the dough with more olive oil, grind pepper on top, and sprinkle on fleur de sel (or any flaky sea salt) to taste.

Bake in a pre-heated 400 to 450 F oven until brown. If it smells like the olive oil is burning, turn down the oven.