I’m no stranger to focaccia bread. Specifically, foccacia bread with onion and rosemary that was so good I even recommended making it to impress a date (and I promise you won’t wind up with onion breath).

I wish I could whole-heartedly recommend Peter Reinhart’s recipe but for the strapped-for-time bread baker, I wouldn’t suggest anything other than the olive oil dough from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. If you’re entertaining, though, this is the bread for you. It makes enough bread to easily feed a crowd, and a hungry crowd, at that.

Peter Reinhart’s dough was difficult to manage because there was so much of it. Between each proof, I thought it might outgrow the pan. I had visions of it ballooning in my oven like a big, sticky dough pillow that I would have to untangle from my oven racks….and what kind of photo would that be?Luckily, the bread that emerged from my oven (crisis averted) was crispy and soft in all the right places and was perfect, when served as an appetizer or as a sandwich, stuffed with fresh basil, tomatoes and mozzarella cheese.

Since one of the rules of the Bread Baker’s Apprentice challenge is that we don’t post the recipes from the book, here are a few recipes that you could try:

Fine Cooking’s Basic Focaccia from Peter Reinhart
Bewitching Kitchen’s BBA Focaccia
Delish.com’s Onion Tomato Focaccia
Cookie Madness’ Basic Focaccia