Quick and easy focaccia using store-bought pizza dough in 15 minutes

Well bakers, I love the convenience of pizza dough that you can buy at the store. But did you know how versatile it can be? I'm going to show you how to make a pizza dough focaccia and it is out of this world. It is so easy. All you need is a bag of pizza dough, some pesto, some olive oil and some cherry tomatoes. That is it. Check out how to do it. So here I have an eight by eight pan. I like this size because it just means you get a really thick focaccia, which means like extra bubbles, which is what my favorite part of it is. I've got some lovely olive oil, good quality olive oil. I'm going to put that in the pan. So for this recipe, you want a pound of pizza dough. So I'm just going to roll it over in my oil to coat it and get it nice and oily. I think my favorite part of focaccia, of iron type focaccia is just how oily the bread gets. And when you're eating it, it's also like your hands almost get like moist, so delicious, salty and yummy. So what I'm going to do is use my fingers to just push the dough into the corners of the pan. So if you can't buy a bag of pizza dough, you can use any recipe that you find online and I do have my no-knead pizza dough on biggerbolderbaking.com. The reason I do specify a pound of dough is because a pound of dough is the perfect size for an 8x8. If you do a 9x13, you don't have enough dough, you're not able to reach the sides. So this is what we're looking for. So that's really the heavy lifting of this recipe. What you want to do now is cover it in cling wrap like we do any yeasted dough. We're going to lay a clean kitchen towel over it. Keep it nice and snug. You want to leave it out at room temperature for a minimum of four hours but up to six hours. Now I really need you to follow this step. I'll tell you why the longer it rests, the slower time it has to get even bigger. It's what's going to give you those big lovely bubbles that we all love about focaccia. So go four hours, go five go six hours if you have the luxury of time and it will really make all the difference. So I gave my focaccia plenty of time and look at this, it should rise up a lot towards the top of the tin. Look how it's nice and jiggly. This is why I love working with bread, just a few ingredients of yeast and flour, a little bit of salt and water makes like these incredible breads like a whole different variety. So now here's what we want to do with our little fingers, we're going to dimple our focaccia. Just a few dimples in there. Gorgeous. You see all those big beautiful bubbles. This is why I want to go, you know, at least four hours. Now on the top of this, I'm going to add my cherry tomatoes. Tomatoes are in season right now. They're beautiful and flavorful. And it just kind of makes a little bit meatier. But you can do whatever you want. You can do roasted garlic, whatever you like. Now Now often on focaccia you'll see people use rosemary or sage or different types of herbs. What I'm going to do is actually I got some store bought pesto so we're going really semi homemade here and I'm going to just kind of dollop that around the top. With pesto I find the flavor to be strong so I'm just going to add a little bit all over. It has a lovely fresh flavor almost kind of zesty if you will and it has all the lovely built-in ingredients, it has cheese in there, it has oil, all the things that we love. So there you go, our pizza dough focaccia is ready to go into the oven in no time at all. Focaccia loves a really hot oven so we're gonna bake it at 425°F, 220°C for roughly around 22 minutes or so. You want to see it get lovely and golden brown on top but don't let it get too dark because the pesto can burn. When your focaccia is golden brown on top, it is ready to come out of the oven. with bread I always say let it cool down but I have to say I can't resist with this focaccia and I like to serve it hot from the oven. I love seeing the pesto get nice and toasty and the way that the tomato is blistered. It's really beautiful. Once you cut into this bread you instantly see the texture that you created over the proofing time. This recipe is a really lovely one because it's semi-homemade, it's easy to pull together and you can customize it any way you want. I really enjoyed this recipe and it makes me think what else can we make using a bag of pizza dough? Let me know in the comments below and I'll see you back here again really soon.