Cinnamon Sugar Pull Apart Bread

Dear cinnamon sugar pull apart bread. You taste like the endless inside of a cinnamon roll. You make my tummy happy. I like you.

Seriously, if you do anything this weekend, make this bread this bread. It is without a doubt one of the best things to emerge from my kitchen in recent memory. I know I say that a lot... but whatever. It's totally true. And I guarantee that anyone you share this with will agree that's it's awesome. However, the likelihood that this will make it much further than your kitchen without being gobbled up and completely disappearing is low. Just a warning.

I saw this recipe on Joy the Baker and it is easily one of my new favorite blogs. Go check it out - Joy is super awesome.

Cinnamon Sugar Pull-Apart Bread
Source: Joy the Baker

For the bread:
2 3/4 + 2 tbsp all purpose flour
1/4 cup sugar
2 1/4 tsp yeast
1/2 tsp salt
2 tbsp unsalted butter
1/3 cup milk
1/4 cup water
1 tsp vanilla

For the filling:
1 cup sugar
2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg
2 tbsp unsalted butter

In a large mixing bowl, combine 2 cups flour, sugar, yeast, and salt. Whisk the eggs in a small bowl and set aside. In a small saucepan, melt butter over medium heat. Add milk and cook until just heated. Remove from heat and add water and vanilla. Let cool for a few minutes until the side of the pan feels warm to touch, not hot (or use a thermometer and measure it at 115-125... I use the hand trick... because my kitchen thermometer sucks).

Mix the milk with the dry ingredients until just starting to combine. Add the eggs and mix into the dough. Add the remaining flour and stir for about 2 minutes. Transfer the dough to a new lightly greased bowl and turn to coat. Cover with plastic wrap and place in a warm happy environment for about 1 hour, or until the dough has doubled in size.

When the dough is almost done rising, melt the butter for the filling over medium heat. Once it is melted, start swirling the pan over the heat until the butter is nicely browned. It should have a golden color and smell nutty. Set aside. Mix together remaining ingredients for the filling and set aside.

Punch the dough down and transfer to a lightly floured work surface. Add 2 more tbsp of flour and knead into the dough. Cover with a towel and let rest for about 5 minutes. Roll or stretch the dough into a long rectangle, about 12 inches wide and 20 inches long, keeping the long edge toward you. Spread the browned butter all over the dough and sprinkle with sugar mix. Cut the dough, width wise, into 6 even strips. As you go, stack the dough, on top of the previously cut strip, sugar side up. Once you have cut all of the strips and you have a stack of dough 6 slices high, turn so that the long edge faces you. Cut the stack into 6 even squares. Turn each of the six square stacks of dough onto the edge and place into a loaf pan. The 6 squares of 6 slices should fill up the entire loaf pan. Cover the dough with plastic wrap and let it rise for about 30-45 minutes in a warm place.

Bake the bread at 350 for about 30 to 35 minutes, or until the top is a deep golden brown (mine took more like 45 minutes). If it isn't completely golden brown, the dough may not be completely cooked through.

Let cool in the loaf pan for a few minutes, then flip out onto a plate and serve. Watch as it disappeares.

Enjoy!

No Knead Bread

 I know at one point I said that John is the yeast man, in charge of all things yeast related in our house. And while he's still in charge of beer making, I have (almost) taken over making bread. You can read about my other adventures in the land of yeast here, here, here, and here. And now I'm trying one more.

For the insane, giant and amazing Christmas dinner, my sister-in-law made this delicious and deceptively easy bread. I know this recipe is on so many other food blogs that it's almost silly to add yet another post about how wonderful it is to the general blogoshpere, but I'm doing it anyway. Because this is hands down my favorite bread both to bake and to eat. I've made it at least 3 times since we've been back from the holidays. It's the perfect recipe: easy to make and easy to memorize so you can throw it together without a thought.

Seriously, make it for your next dinner party. It will impress all. Just don't tell them how ridiculously simple this is. Or just make it for yourself... that's what I'm doing right now.

No Knead Bread
Source: Smitten Kitchen, originally from Mark Bittman at the New York Times 

3 cups flour
1/4 tsp instant yeast
1 1/4 tsp salt
1 5/8 cups water

Mix flour, salt and yeast in a large bowl. Add water and mix until combined. The dough will be wet, but never fear. This is a good thing. A very good thing. Now cover with plastic wrap and walk away. Walk away for 12-18 hours. I usually make the dough sometime the day before I want to make the bread. Then at some point the next day I continue on with the recipe. I haven't worried about the 12-18 hours timeline yet and each time I've made this it has been perfect.

Lightly flour a work surface and turn the dough out onto the surface. Quickly fold the dough twice with lightly floured hands. Cover the dough with a towel (not terrycloth) and let it sit for 15 minutes. Quickly form the dough into a ball and place it on a towel dusted with cornmeal. (Cornmeal works better, but flour will be OK in a pinch.) Cover the dough with another towel and let rise for another 2 hours.

At least 30 minutes before the dough is done rising, put a 5 quart dutch oven or a similar sized Corning Ware dish with a lid in the oven. Preheat to 450. Once the oven is preheated, carefully remove the dutch oven from the oven. Carefully slide you hand under the towel with the dough and quickly turn it into the dutch oven. Shake the dutch oven a little to spread the dough out a bit. Replace the lid on the dutch oven and bake for 30 minutes. Remove the lid and continue baking for 15-30 minutes until bread is lightly browned. Remove from the oven and carefully turn bread onto a cooling rack. Let cool for at least 30 minutes.

Enjoy!

Spent Grain Bread

Now that Christmas is over and I've eaten more Italian food than I ever thought possible, I have a question for you. And it's an important question. 

Are you a beer brewer? Do you have any friends who brew beer? If not, it is my professional suggestion that you change that. Quickly. Seriously because not only is home-brew really good beer, so is bread made from the grains used to make the beer. Lucky for me I'm married to a home-brewer and I have several friends and family members who brew their own beer.

I made this a few weeks ago with some spent grains I got from one of our beer-brewing friends. He was making a Chocolate Stout, so the bread had a really delicious rich grainy chocolaty flavor. You could use any kind of grains from any kind of beer-making adventure you embark on. It would be really fun too, because the type of beer would dramatically change the flavor and consistency of the bread.

I brought two giant muslin bags full of spent grain home and then had to figure out what to actually do with them. After a little bit of Googling I found a few recipes for Spent Grain Bread. A lot of them seemed to use the grains as an accessory to the typical bread ingredients, except this one which highlighted the grains and used a ton of them (which was great because even after making this is still have ¾ of the grains left in my freezer). I wanted the bread to be really dense and grainy and that's exactly what I got.

Spent Grain Bread
Source: Adapted from Beer At Joe's

The grains can be frozen until you want to make the bread. It might be a good idea to grind them up in the food processor first and then freeze them, but I thawed them in the refrigerator and then put them through the food processor and it worked just fine. The dough can also be frozen in loaves on a cookie sheet and then thawed and baked later. Or you can just freeze the baked bread and thaw and eat later.

2 cups all-purpose flour
2 cups whole wheat flour
2 tsp salt
2 tsp yeast
3 cups spent grain
¼ cup sugar
¼ cup melted butter
1 cup milk at room temperature

To prepare the grains, pulse them in the food processor until they are the desired consistency. I left mine a little chunky instead of grinding it into a finer mix (see above picture).

Mix the all-purpose flour, whole wheat flour, salt and sugar together in the bowl of an electric mixer (if you're making it by hand just use a large bowl). Add the yeast and the spent grains and combine. Add the melted butter and mix until combined. With the mixer running add the milk, just until the dough starts to pull away from the sides of the bowl (you might not use the whole cup, depending on how wet the grains were). If the dough gets too wet, add more all-purpose flour. If it's too dry, add more milk. If using the electric mixer, switch to the dough hook and knead on medium speed for 5 minutes. If not, knead for about 10 minutes on a lightly floured surface. Transfer dough to a lightly oiled bowl and turn to coat. Let rise for about 1 1/2 or 2 hours, until dough has doubled in size.

After the dough has risen, separate into thirds and form each third into balls. Let rise on a cookie sheet for 1 hour, covered with plastic wrap.

Preheat oven to 350. Score the loaves and bake on an ungreased cookie sheet for 40 minutes. Rotate the pan halfway through.

Let the bread cool for about 30 minutes on a wire rack.

Enjoy!

Herbed Foccacia

A few nights ago I had some friends over for a seriously girly mini movie marathon. John felt the need to leave so he wasn't overwhelmed by the dorkiness of the movies we were watching.


Anyway, I saw this recipe a few weeks ago and I couldn't wait to try it. And it seeme d like a perfect snack for hanging out and watching a few movies. And it was!



Herbed Foccacia
Originally from The Pioneer Woman

1 1/2 cup warm Water
1 1/2 tsp. Instant Yeast
2 Cups Bread Flour
2 Cups All-Purpose Flour
1 tsp. Kosher Salt
1/3 Cup Olive Oil
2 sprigs Rosemary, chopped
1/4 Cup loosely packed Basil leaves, chopped
1/2 Cup Parmesan Cheese

Sprinkle yeast over warm water. Let stand for a few minutes.

In a mixer, combine flour and salt. With the mixer running on low speed, drizzle the olive oil until combined. Next, pour in the yeast water mixture and mix until just combined.

Drizzle olive oil into a large mixing bowl. Form the dough into a ball and transfer it to the bowl, coating it in olive oil. Cover the bowl tightly and leave it in a warm place for 1-2 hours (mine took 2).

Place the dough on a lightly floured surface and kneed for a few seconds. Split the dough in two equal parts. Spread half the rosemary and sprinkle a little Parmesan cheese onto the dough. Kneed a little bit to mix the herbs and cheese into the dough. Using a rolling pin, spread the dough into a rectangle. Drizzle olive oil onto a cookie sheet and center the dough rectangle on the sheet. Cover with plastic wrap. Do the same with the basil and the other half of dough. Let the dough rise for 1 hour.

Remove plastic wrap and drizzle olive oil over foccacia. Sprinkle with kosher salt, Parmesan cheese, and remaining herbs.

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Bake foccacia for 30 minutes, or until golden brown on top. Slice with a pizza slicer and serve warm. Yum!