Johnsenclan

Bread Part 5

Pesto and Parmesan Bread

Britnie took a bite of this one and I immediately knew I had a winner. It’s a little more work because you need to make a small amount of pesto. But the fact I made this on Saturday and it was gone on Sunday says a lot. Like all the recipes I’ve been doing, this makes two loaves.

First make the pesto mixture
1 cups fresh basil leaves, packed
1/4 cup shredded Parmesan cheese
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
2 minced garlic cloves
Salt and pepper to taste

Just mix this all up in a food processor for 30 seconds

Then make the bread dough

1 cup warm water

1 1/2 cups water
2 1/2 t yeast
2 t kosher salt
1 T honey
6 cups flour
4 t softened butter

kosher salt

basil

Combine the warm water with the yeast and sugar in a bowl and let it get foamy for 5 minutes or so. Add the remaining water.
Combine the dry ingredients in the mixer and let it mix for 30 seconds. Add in the softened butter and wet ingredients slowly and let it mix for about a minute. If it’s still sticking to the sides, add a little more flour. If it’s clumpy add a little more water.

Put the ball of dough in a bowl sprayed with Pam and let it rise for an hour. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap sprayed with Pam.

Flatten the dough into a rectangle about 10 inches long. Spread a thick layer of the pesto at the beginning of the rectangle, then roll it halfway and add another layer of pesto. Roll it the rest of the way into a loaf and pinch the ends so the pesto doesn’t leak all over the place.

Preheat the oven to 400F. Brush the top of the loaf with olive oil and sprinkle crushed basil and kosher salt on the top. Put in the loaves and drop the temperature to 375 F

Bake for 25 minutes at 375 F. Sprinkle Parmesan cheese on the top of the loaves and cook them for five more minutes.

Bread Part 4

As you can probably tell, I like mixing stuff in with the bread. This time instead of cinnamon I thought I’d try something else Sidney would like, chocolate.

Chocolate Chip Swirl Bread

1/2 cup warm water

2 cups water
1 1/2 t yeast
1 t kosher salt
2 T brown sugar
6 cups flour
3 t softened butter
1/2 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips (or whatever type of chocolate you prefer)

Put the dough in a bowl sprayed with Pam and let it rise for an hour. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap sprayed with Pam.

Flatten the dough into a rectangle about 12 inches long. Chop the chocolate chips into small bits and sprinkle them over the rectangle as you roll it up into loaf form. Put the loaf in the loaf pan. Cover that with plastic wrap sprayed with Pam and let it rise another 45-60 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 375F. Brush the tops of the loaves with melted butter and sprinkle more chocolate bits on top.

Bake for 30 minutes at 375 F. You’ll want to brush the top with butter again if you like the crust extra soft.

Bread Part 3

Cinnamon Bagels

First of all I realize people have been baking bread forever and this is nothing special, but it’s an excuse to post pictures and that I really like.

This one was mostly for fun. I love bagels, but will probably never make this recipe again. It’s a lot of work for twelve bagels. It’s also dangerous because I might try to replicate Einstein’s Bagel Bites which are little pieces of heaven wrapped up in a donut-hole size bagel covered in chocolate or cinnamon. Mmmmmhhhhhh. After the diet maybe.

This recipe makes about 12 bagels.

Start
1 t yeast
4 cups flour
2 1/2 cups warm water
1 t brown sugar

Actual dough
1/2 t yeast
3 1/2 cups flour (with a little more set aside in case the dough is too wet)
3 t salt
1 1/2 T brown sugar

Toppings
1 Salt for the water
Cornmeal or flour for the bottoms
Cinnamon/sugar mix, chocolate chips, basil, oregano, salt

Make the Start
Combine the warm water, brown sugar and yeast, let it bubble for five minutes. Stir the yeast into the flour in a large mixing bowl. It will be pretty gooey. Cover with plastic wrap sprayed with Pam let it rise for two hours.

Remove the plastic wrap and stir the additional yeast into the Start. Add 3 cups of the flour, the brown sugar and the salt into the bowl and mix until all of the ingredients form a ball. Slowly add the additional 3/4 cups of flour to make the dough really stiff. The dough needs to be drier than normal bread dough, but everything needs to still stick together.

Also, this one was all by hand, so knead it for 10 minutes.

Split the dough into a dozen small pieces and roll each piece into a ball. When you have all 12 pieces made, cover them with a damp towel and let them raise for 20 minutes.

Poke your thumb through the center of each roll and then spin it making the wheel shape. It needs to be even on all sides. We made the opening about the size of a quarter, but that made the whole almost disappear as it rose and cooked. I’d make it the size of a half dollar.

Put the shapes dough on parchment paper or the counter that’s been sprayed with oil. Cover them with plastic and let them raise 20-30 minutes. Start boiling a huge pot of water and preheat the oven to 500.

Cook each bagel for 1 minute on each side in the boiling water. Cover a cookie sheet with cornmeal or flour and lay each boiled bagel on the sheet. Lightly brush with butter or olive oil and add toppings. We did some chocolate chip, some cinnamon and some with various spices. The cinnamon were the best.

Bake for five minutes at 500, then rotate the cookie sheet and bake for 5-8 minutes at 450. They’ll turn slightly brown.

Links 2/5/10

Texas Board of Education bans Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you see? to save the children while a Virginia school bans Diary of Anne Frank
Selleck, sandwich, waterfall
Despite low approval ratings, this current congress has been extremely productive and liberals may not be excited at how moderate President Obama is, but there may be a quiet revolution
Utahns are the 11th hottest in the nation
Stephen Colbert already has an iPad
How humans ran comfortably before shoes

Bread Part 2

White Sandwich Bread
So the cinnamon bread was a huge success, but Britnie wanted a bread that wasn’t sweet for sandwiches. Also the cinnamon swirl was mostly dark, so I thought I’d try a white bread.

I was pretty good at the basics after three weeks of experimenting with the cinnamon bread, so this one was pretty simple. Again I tried things from a couple of websites to get what I wanted. This one is probably still a little heavy on the yeast, it gets out of control during the second rising stage. So if you don’t want to watch it closely, change the amount of yeast to 1 1/2 t.

1 cup warm water

1 1/2 cups water
2 1/2 t yeast
2 T sugar or 1 T honey
6-7 cups flour
1 t kosher salt
4 T softened butter

Olive oil

Red pepper flakes

Oregano

Basil

Throw your dough ball in a bowl sprayed with Pam and let it rise for an hour. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap sprayed with Pam.

Roll it into a loaf shape and place it in the loaf pan loaf pan. Cover that with plastic wrap sprayed with Pam and let it rise another 45 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 375F. Brush the tops of the loaves with Olive oil and sprinkle with red pepper flakes, basil and Oregano (next time I’ll probably add some garlic salt as well).

Bake for 35 minutes at 375, using the same trick as yesterday with the steam. If you want soft crust brush the loaves with Olive Oil again when they come out of the oven.

Tomorrow? Bagel-making with the kids!

Bread Part 1

Cinnamon Swirl Bread
For a three or four months we were trying new ice cream recipes every weekend. That came to an end when I started dieting after Thanksgiving, because ice cream is an issue for me. So now I haven’t had ice cream in over a month, which is great because I’ve lost a bunch of weight, but I miss experimenting with recipes every weekend. So now I’ve turned to bread.

The first one came from necessity. Sidney’s favorite bread in the world is Great Harvest Cinnamon Swirl bread. She doesn’t even need a topping. Well they made an adjustment to their ingredients list. Now it said “manufactured in a facility that may have nuts” and that was Continue reading Bread Part 1

Links 2/3/10

A plethora

Avoiding hipster baby names and names given to children of supermodels
Have you ever watched a tv show and thought “that’s just like my life”? Well it happened to me a few days ago while we were trying out a new show, The Middle. It was scary how much the dialogue resembled things Britnie and I say to each other. It’s a pretty funny show so far.
National Geographic has an amazing article, along with the usual amazing photos, on Mormon Fundamentalists
Portraits of people hanging upside down
Britain’s Medical Council ruled against Andrew Wakefield, the doctor who started the vaccine/autism scare with his shoddy research. They’ll decide later if he’ll be stripped of his medical license.
How to catch an iPhone thief.
Clear lens face piercing
Life Magazines gallery of famous literary drunks and addicts
A new magazine, Mormon Artist
Dear Mr. Tea Partier (or why are Republicans mad that President Obama gave them a tax cut? And why do they hate pay raises?)
The twenty best extended shots on film (numbers 4 and 10 are my personal favorites)
Rare photos of famous people

A quick programming note. A couple of people had asked what was wrong with my other site. There was a DNS issue and it was down for a week. Jeremy Johnsen Images is back up and running now.

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