Quote Originally Posted by ZenSojourner View Post
*still waiting for her baking peel*

In the meantime - you know that dipping sauce you get for foccacia (or at least foccacia-like) bread in the snootier Italian restaurants?

How the heck do you make that stuff? I've never found any pre-made that was any good, and attempts to date to make it myself have been unsuccessful.
My DH just likes to use our salad dressing for that bread dipping.
Our favorite salad dressing:
make a cruet of dressing using the Good Seasons dry dressing mix from an envelope. But use extra virgin robust flavored olive oil, and some good balsamic vinegar. Then I also add a couple teaspoons of freeze-dried 'salad herbs' that I keep in the fridge after opening.

ZS: a tip about the peel....don't wash it by soaking it with water! People keep saying their wood peels are warping/cracking when washed, etc.
Oh but you are getting the non-wood peel, right?- then no problem.

What I do is: when I shape the loaf/loaves, I then let them 'rest' by putting a sheet of parchment on the peel and sprinkling the parchment with some corn meal- I lay the loaves on that. When time to bake, I just slide the loaves, parchment and all, right on to the hot baking stone and bake. (The parchment is good for about two baking sessions.) When done, it's easy to again slide the peel under the parchment and remove bread parchment and all. The bread seems to come right off the cornmealed parchment with no problem, and my peel actually never gets doughy or needs washing- my Stone stays clean too. If each parchment piece is used twice, the parchment roll will last a l-o-n-g time.

I used to make lots of many kinds of bread 20 years ago- sourdough, w.wheat, pastries, white loaf bread....making it the old fashioned way with a couple of risings. But I never got such yummy chewy/stretchy bread with a crisp crust as from the basic boule recipe in the Artisan Bread 5 Minutes book! It's exactly the way I love my bread to be and I never got it that way before.
One thing though- the basic (using 6 1/3 cups flour) really only makes 3 very modest sized loaves bread- not 4 as they claim. 4 to a batch comes out too tiny, and 2 to a batch are too large and don't rise as well. 3 seems just right!