A Good Imagination and a Pile of Junk

Haven’t posted a bread recipe in a dog’s age.  I made this last weekend when in Virginia and it was a rather impressive hit:

For the dough:

3 1/2 Cups	Flour (All purpose works fine for this.)
2 Tbsp	Olive Oil
2 1/4 tsp (or 1 pkg)	Active Dry Yeast
1 3/4 Cups	Water
1 Tbsp	Sugar
1 Tbsp	Salt

You’ll also need:

1/2 Cup

Olive Oil

Topping:

You can go a few ways with this. What’s worked for me is the following:

1 1/2 Tbsp	Kosher or Sea Salt (large grained)
a bunch (?)	Rosemary. I’ve now used fresh and dried and I have to say that the flavor of the dried seems to come out better than the fresh. Smarter people than me are probably nodding knowingly.
About 3/4 Cup	Grated Asiago (Parm works nearly as well)

As you can see, it’s actually a very simple bread. Because the focus of this is primarily on the topping and crust, you have some latitude in how much attention you want to pay to the bread proper. This is something I pull out as a crowd pleaser when I don’t have my kitchen, bowls, scales, measuring stuff and ingredients handy (my kitchen doesn’t exactly travel well.)

1. So as for technique you can really just combine everything, mix and knead, then set to rise for about an hour and a half. It should be close to doubled if not more.
2. Pan the dough into two well-oiled 8×8 “brownie pans.” I’m a big fan of pyrex for this. However, this past weekend I used a large piece of stoneware that was quite nice. Unfortunately I don’t quite know what the dimensions were. Let it rise in this form for a bit over an hour.
3. Preheat the oven to 375
4. Carefully dimple the dough with your fingers. You should push down a little more than half way with your finger tips. This isn’t the most precise of operations. At the end the dough should have a grid of dimples over the whole thing.
5. Pour 1/3 to 1/2 Cup of olive oil over the dough. What you’re looking for here is for an awful lot of it to slide down the sides into the bottom of the pan, with a bunch pooling in the little dimples you just added to the surface.
6. Add the Kosher/Sea Salt and the Rosemary. But do NOT top the loaves with cheese. That comes later.
7. Into the oven (at 375) for a half-hour.
8. Pull both loaves out and then sprinkle the top with cheese. I’m frequently surprised at how much cheese can actually be added without overpowering this, so don’t worry. (If you put the cheese on before they go in the oven then the cheese will burn before the bread is actually done and you’ll end up with an unavoidable mess. Different cheeses behave differently, but doing things this way is pretty safe.)
9. Put them back in the oven for the last 10-15 minutes. You’ll have to eyeball it. You’re looking for the toothpick test plus a couple minutes.
10. Take it out and let it cool a bit before cutting in to it. It’s not a baguette so I’m not going to suggest you wait until it’s completely cooled. But give it a minute.

The addition of the Olive Oil is quite nice as it essentially deep-fries the crust. This is why it’s important you don’t try to do this on a simple cookie sheet or (heaven forbid) a silpat.

It looks like a lot of steps, but there’s really not so much that can go wrong. It’s a nice crowd pleaser.

I’d also encourage experimentation with toppings.

Of course if you’re being persnickety you can doll up the process a bunch and you’ll no doubt get a great enhancement. So things like proofing the yeast and setting up a preferment so you can get a second or third rise out of it is strictly optional.

Tags: Baking

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 6th, 2008 at 2:19 pm and is filed under Baking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.