Herbed Beer Breadsticks/Rolls

To download a copy of this recipe for Herbed Beer Breadsticks/Rolls, click HERE.

[Please note: If you’ve experienced problems in the past trying to download recipes from Kissing the Cook, you’ll be pleased to know I’ve changed to a different cloud site that should work a lot better. Give it a try!]

In the photo accompanying last week’s recipe post, the Steamed Carrot Noodles with Bolognese was shown served with a very tasty herbed, beer batter breadstick. As promised, this week I’m glad to share the wonderfully simple recipe for making the breadsticks or, if you prefer, dinner rolls. (As you’ll see in the recipe below, the difference between making a breadstick and making a roll is just one simple step that takes but a few seconds.) Aside from being easy and delicious, beer breads have the added advantage of being a lot faster to make than yeast breads since there’s no rising or proofing required.

Here’s another nice thing about these breadsticks: varying the herbs and the beer can customize the breadsticks to the dish with which you’re serving them. I made them using  sage and rosemary, but substitute any other herbs that suit your needs. (For pairing herbs with food and with each other, a site I’ve found useful can be found at http://www.frontiercoop.com/learn/ss_usage.php.)

For the beer, select one that, if you were drinking it, would go well with the dish you’re serving. Many beer manufacturers have web sites that help pairing a beer with your food. (For example, information for the Sam Adams line I often turn to for its quality and the wide range of flavors available can be found at http://www.samueladams.com/enjoy-our-beer/food-beer/index.aspx.)

This recipe makes 12 breadsticks or dinner rolls.

Preheat oven to 425 degrees.

Sift together 4 cups of all-purpose flour (not bread flour which, in this case, would make the bread too heavy); 2 Tbsp baking powder; ½ Tbsp kosher salt; and ¼ cup sugar.

Add ¼ cup of chopped fresh sage.

Using a fork, cut in ¼ cup of cold butter substitute.

Add 12 ounces of room temperature beer and mix until a dough forms. (Be careful opening the beer. At room temperature, it can sometimes froth up when first opened. We don’t need to discuss how I found this out.)

Line a baking sheet with parchment or a silicon sheet.

Turn the dough onto a floured surface and divide in half. While working with the first half, cover and refrigerate the second half.

Divide the half-dough into six equal parts. On a floured surface, roll each part into snakes about 10” long.

For breadsticks, you’ll use the snakes “as is.” If you prefer making rolls, first tie the snake into a loose overhand knot…

…then tuck in the ends.

Place the snakes or rolls on the baking sheet and brush the tops with olive oil.

Sprinkle with chopped rosemary. (You’ll need about ¼ cup to do all 12 breadsticks/rolls.)

Bake till lightly browned, about 16 minutes, turning the baking sheet half-way. (Don’t bake until dark brown bread as you would with some other breads or it will be overdone.)

Repeat the cutting and baking steps with the second half of the dough. Serve warm.

To download a copy of this recipe for Herbed Beer Breadsticks/Rolls, click HERE.

Fresh bread doesn’t get much easier than that! You can experiment with different herb combinations, as well as with different beers. Have fun with it!

Hope you enjoy making this delicious – and very useful – bread with your meals. Please come back and visit again next week for another recipe! Till then, stay well, keep it about the food, and always remember to kiss the cook. ;-)

Rosemary Focaccia Bread with Just a Hint of Garlic

A few weeks ago I posted a recipe for home-made Italian bread that turned out to be quite popular. Today we’re going to take it up a level and make one of my all-time favorite recipes: home-made Rosemary Focaccia Bread with Just a Hint of Garlic. Its savory taste and slightly chewy texture make focaccia (pronounced foh-KAH-chah) perfect for a wide range of toppings or fillings, as an accompaniment to a delicious meal, or even by itself, warmed and gently dipped in just a bit of olive oil!

As with most breads, most of the time required to make it is inactive time, during which the dough does the work and you don’t even have to be in the kitchen. So don’t let the amount of time described in the recipe deter you from one of the best breads you’ll ever have. Just take it step-by-step, and you’ll be surprised at how easy it is to have your kitchen graced by the aroma of a warm, fresh-out-of-the-oven focaccia.

Cook’s Notes:

• Although the basic recipe uses water, if you made the ricotta cheese recipe from a couple of weeks ago and still have the leftover whey, here’s a great place to use it. The recipe below explains both methods; if you decide to use the whey, I think you’ll be pleased at the flavor and texture it adds. (I sure was!)

• The recipe calls for 2-1/2 pounds of bread flour. This is about 8 cups, but if you can it’s better to measure this out by weight.

• While we’re on the subject, remember to use bread flour, not all-purpose flour. Bread flour has a higher gluten content that gives bread its characteristic firm texture. (For recipes such as focaccia, Italian bread and pizza dough, high-gluten flour, which has a gluten content even higher than bread flour, is even better to use, but that’s an ingredient you’re more likely to find in bulk at a restaurant supply house than in small packages at the supermarket.)

This recipe makes one baking sheet (half-sheet) size focaccia. (Once you taste it, you’ll be glad you made enough to go around!)

Combine 5 ounces of olive oil and 6 sliced cloves of garlic in a non-stick pan over medium heat and cook for a few minutes until the garlic is browned but not burnt. Remove and dispose of the garlic. Set the flavored oil aside for use in the rest of the recipe.

Whisk two 0.25 ounce packages of dry yeast into 1 cup of warm (about 110 degrees) water, and set it aside to rest for five minutes.

Combine 2-1/2 pounds (about 8 cups) of bread flour and 4 teaspoons of salt in a bowl and mix well. (When the yeast is added in the next step, you don’t want it to be in direct contact with the salt. This can damage the yeast.)

Form a large well in the flour mixture and pour in 3 cups of room temperature water (or three cups of whey) and three ounces of the olive oil. Whisk the liquids together to cool the oil, and then whisk in the yeast mixture. (Otherwise, the heat from the oil can damage the yeast.) Mix the liquids into the flour mixture to form a smooth, sticky dough. (If using a stand mixture, mix at low speed for about 4 minutes.)

Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and allow the dough to ferment until at least doubled. (This usually takes an hour to about an hour and twenty minutes.)

Once the dough has doubled in size, use the garlic-flavored olive oil to oil a half-sheet pan. Transfer the dough onto the pan without folding the dough. Rubbing a bit of oil onto your hands, press and stretch the dough into the pan.

Pour the remaining flavored olive oil onto the dough and spread it around till the entire top of the dough is oiled.

Use your fingertips to make dimples over the entire surface of the dough.

Distribute 1 teaspoon of Kosher salt and ¾ cup of stemmed, fresh rosemary (about ¾ ounce unstemmed) evenly over the top of the dough, and press them down into the dough gently. Cover the focaccia with oiled plastic wrap and leave on the counter to “bench proof” until at least doubled in size. (This usually takes about an hour.)

Bake in a non-convection oven at 450 degrees for about 20 minutes until well-colored and baked through. Slide to a rack to cool. (And if you want to keep walking over to your focaccia and inhaling the heavenly aroma, that’s fine too!)

Buon appetito, i miei amici!

Visit again next week for a special in-time-for-Valentine’s Day recipe! Till then, stay well, keep it about the food, and always remember to kiss the cook. ;-)

Easy, Fresh Italian Bread

A warm welcome to new subscriber Margot!

As part of last week’s recipe for a delicious spaghetti and homemade meatballs dinner with an easy-to-prepare no-cook tomato sauce, I promised to come back with directions for the fresh-baked Italian bread I served on the side. Today I keep that promise.

What’s that you say? Baking bread is difficult? Not at all! Although we’ll be making ours by hand, remember that some people make bread by putting the ingredients in a bread machine, walking away, and coming back later when the bread is finished, with the machine having done all the work; how much thinking could be involved? This is especially true of Italian bread, which is usually kept simple because one of its main purposes is mopping that delicious sauce from the entrée plate, and you wouldn’t want embellish it with herbs or other savory flavors that might conflict with your sauce. (That said, it’s also mighty good gently dipped in a small dish of either plain or herbed extra virgin olive oil. I like a dash of vinegar too, but that’s just me.)

If you’re concerned that bread takes hours to make, I have more good news. While it’s true that several hours will pass between the time you start to the time you have fresh, warm bread to serve, for almost all of it the dough is doing the work while you’re off living your life. In the culinary world, this is known as “inactive time.”

Among the few simple ingredients this recipe uses is bread flour. That’s not the same thing as all-purpose flour, but it’s easy to find right next to it in the baking aisle at any supermarket. For a quick description of what the difference is, here’s a link to a recipe for Savory Crust Pizza posted here previously.

This introduction to bread-making would be incomplete without this bit of wisdom I read in a wonderful book call, “How I Learned to Cook” by Kimberly Witherspoon and Peter Meehan. It's a compilation of early experiences related by a collection of well-known chefs. One of the chapters was from Nancy Silverton, co-founder (and bread expert) of a number of high-level restaurants in California. What she said, which I simply loved, included this:

"I realized I couldn't think about bread the way I thought about pastry or pasta or any other typical culinary undertaking. Bread is alive. Minor inconsistencies are a fact of life, not a mark of failure. The tiny variation in the loaves from day to day made them unique, not imperfect. And the relationship of a baker to her bread is like any other kind of serious relationship you have with anybody in life. It's never perfect. It takes so much work. And every time you think that you've mastered it, the next day you're brought back to reality and it needs some more work."

Let’s bake some fresh bread! This recipe makes four 4 loaves.

Dissolve 1 package (1/4 oz.) dry yeast and ½ teaspoon of sugar in 2 cups of 110 degree F water and let it rest for about five minutes. (The mixture should foam while resting.)

Sift 1-1/2 pounds of bread flour, setting another ¼ pound aside for adding later if needed for texture. (It’s easier to add flour to a dough that’s too moist than it is to add liquid to a dough that’s too dry.)

Add 1 tablespoon of salt and mix well, since direct contact with the salt will kill the yeast in the next step.)

Add water-yeast mixture and mix to form dough.

Knead for 8-10 minutes until the dough becomes smooth and elastic, and just a bit sticky. (You can do this by hand, but it’s easier with a stand mixer fitted with the dough hook attachment.)

Place dough in a well oiled bowl and let stand until about double in size. (Usually 1-2 hours.) The stove top or the top of the refrigerator are good places for this.

After the dough has doubled in size, pressing down with hands to deflate it, then turn it out onto your counter and divide it into four portions.

Press each portion into an oval.

Fold the long sides toward the center. Press out again and repeat.

Using palms, roll each into a cylinder 12 inches long. (Start with palms in the middle and work toward the ends to make the cylinders longer. Don’t pull the dough, which will toughen the gluten in the flour.)

Place each cylinder on a baking sheet dusted with cornmeal. Cover loosely with oiled wrap and “bench-proof” until doubled, about 45 minutes – 1 hour. While the loaves are proofing, pre-heat the oven to 500 degrees.

When the loaves have finished proofing, make three lengthwise cuts on top of each loaf. Place each loaf in oven and bake until browned, about 10 minutes.

Lower the temperature of the oven to 400, and continue baking for another 20-25 minutes until well-colored. Let the loaves cool a bit on racks.

Happy bread-making!

See you next week with another delicious, kitchen-tested recipe made from easy-to-find ingredients. Till then, stay well, keep it about the food, and always remember to kiss the cook. ;-)