Recipe 30: Garlic Bread

A nice one for the 30th recipe because I was so excited to finally get to bake this! I love garlic bread, well I think about everyone does! But this recipe was a lot different to what I expected.

It starts off with the usual mixing around of ingredients, I tried it a little different by not using my hands to mix it round but with a dough scraper instead. I think this work the water into the mixture better because when I started to knead the dough, it certainly felt much more different than usual! I'm not sure how to describe it but it seemed to stretch more – I'm going to try it again this way in the next recipe and hopefully make a better description then I have at the moment!

Whilst waiting for the bread to rise, the garlic needed roasting. This recipe required three bulbs of garlic, three! I couldn't believe it! Anyway, with a dash of olive oil and a sprinkle of caster sugar I roasted the cloves for around 20 minutes until golden brown.

I cannot believe how pretty this dough looked when I uncovered it, what a surprise! I left the dough much longer than I usually do, I think it was nearly coming up to 3 hours, any longer than I would have been worried that it might fall back down.

By now, the garlic is now nice and cool and onto the next part which confused me as the recipe said to knead the garlic into the dough, which was fun but I found it odd saying to knead it again? But in theory I think I was just knocking out the air as I rolled the garlic in it and just the choice of wording in the book confused me.

Once you've 'kneaded' the garlic into the dough, I had to divide the mixture into 2 and stretch them both into oblong shapes and then leave to prove for an hour, I usually leave over an hour if can though, it's been working out better!

Then time to bake for 25 minutes after a sprinkle of oregano and a dash of olive oil! The smell of garlic and bread baking together is a wonderful mix! And wow, did it make me feel hungry! But what did it taste like? I think I would have liked it better if the garlic was more finally chopped as you had to put the whole cloves in, they got a bit squished when kneading it but because the chucks were so big some parts tasted of garlic and then other parts just tasted like normal bread. I would like to try it again with finely chopped garlic next time!