Oh, the wonderful, wonderful world of garlic bread. I don't know if there is a more simple or tasty concoction than bread, butter, and garlic. (Unless we're talking about making it into bruschetta, but that's a whole different recipe.) It's so tasty, and pretty much the perfect accompaniment to lasagna. To make it even better -- it's another super-simple recipe for the kids.
Garlic Bread
There are two main suggestions I have for kids, depending on their skill level, tastes, and interest.
To make the super-simple variety: Very lightly toast some slices from a fresh baguette. Spread butter on the slices, or drizzle olive oil. Sprinkle the bread with garlic powder. Bake or broil at super-high temperature until bread is browned nicely.
To make the more gourmet variety: Take a small baguette and carefully cut slices -- without cutting through the bottom and removing each slice. Make a garlic butter by combining a few minced cloves of garlic, a smidge of salt, a tsp or tbsp of olive oil, and about a quarter cup of butter. If you want it a little herby, add some minced remnants of the fresh basil from the caprese. Spread this butter in between the slices of bread. Wrap the loaf in foil and back in a 350°F for about 15 minutes. Carefully open the foil and bake for another 5 or so, until browned and crunchy.
Bread is a miraculous thing. It's delicious, it gives you energy, it softens your cookies, and it can help you de-clump your brown sugar.
Simply put your sugar in a microwavable container (read: NOT plastic) and place a slice of bread on top. Seal the container and pop in the microwave for 15 seconds. Voila. The moisture from the bread and the resulting steam will make the sugar softer and more pliable, allowing you to work on the clumps (as seen in the highly scientific "cookie osmosis" chart above).
There are a lot of holiday's happening this month. One of the things that can connect them all is bread. It sure does seem like a universal food.
If your holiday has a special bread, or if you're using bread to celebrate a holiday in any way, you might want to share with everyone else. The folks over at Wild Yeast are hosting a blog event this month celebrating holiday breads.
Good, fresh bread is one of life's great pleasures, at least in my opinion. I love to go to a great bakery and pick up a loaf for a special occasion. I wish I could do that every day, but I know it would go bad in my house. We just don't go through bread fast enough.
It would be even better if I could bake bread at home. I love to bake. Bread is usually just so time consuming and it rarely turns out at home like it does at the bakery.
I was reminded this week of an article I read in the New York Times food section from about a year ago that may change my mind. The Minimalist, Mark Bittman, interviewed/apprenticed with the owner of Sullivan Street Bakery, Jim Lahey. Together, they made a loaf using Mr. Lahey's innovative new method for making bread. The idea is to stir everything together(no kneading or anything), let it ferment (the yeast eats the flour to make alcohol and carbon dioxide) for a very long time, then bake it in a cast iron or ceramic covered pot.
The covered pot becomes a steamer once in the oven so you can get bakery level results from stuff you probably already have. The Minimalist had said that this is innovative, and it is. The only thing you need to make good, fresh bread at home is time, and a few things you more than likely have in your kitchen. The recipe and procedure are after the jump.
While I'm not a parent myself, I've spent quite a lot of time in my life providing child care, and so I know that entertaining kids can sometimes be a bit of a challenge. One surefire way to keep the younger set happy is to give them either an art project or a cooking project. When you can combine the two and give them an artistic project that then turns into something they can eat, all the better!
Marie at Make and Takes did a really fun activity with her kids recently, in which she added food coloring to bowls of milk and used them as edible paint that they then used to color bread. The bread got toasted and eaten. They ate their painted toast dry, but you could butter it or give it a glaze with a bit of honey.
A year ago, I was totally swept along by the No-Knead bread tide. I thought it was the best thing ever and would often sing the praises of the technique, because for the first time in my life, I was able to make good bread easily. The only problem with it was that you had to be careful of the timing of when you started the bread, because of the specific waiting periods required.
Luckily for me, Jeff Hertzberg and Zoë François have solved the timing problem by devising an even easier way of making good, fresh bread at home and they've written a cookbook called Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day devoted to their method. They developed a wet dough that can be kept in the refrigerator for up to two weeks. What you do is simply cut off a chunk of dough and bake it off each day as needed. That way one night you can bake up a larger loaf if you're having guests for dinner and the next day, you can just bake off the little bit you need for your afternoon sandwich.
In addition to the standard loaf, Zoë has created an assortment of recipes that allow you to take the basic bread dough and turn it into all sorts of breads from sweet rolls to seeded loaves. The book is written clearly and the recipes are easy to follow. There aren't a ton of pictures, but what are there are gorgeous.
I've personally made several batches of the dough and it's turned out perfectly each time. I even let a batch of dough hang out in my fridge for a full two weeks, to determine if it really was still usable after all that time and discovered that the bread that baked up from that older dough was wonderful, with a distinct sour taste that reminded me of the sourdough I occasionally buy from a local bakery.
One final note about this book is that it is accompanied by an informative website that includes questions from readers and answers from the authors, a section devoted to clearing up an errors in the book and videos of Jeff and Zoe in baking action.
Today's featured image is a gorgeous, half sliced loaf of homemade whole wheat sourdough bread. Being the sucker for bread that I am, this image makes me wish I could catapult myself through my computer screen and land next to this loaf. Sad that we haven't discovered a way to make that happen yet. If you want a little history on this particular loaf of bread, check out Jenn's blog entry about it. Apparently she's discovered a recipe that uses all whole wheat flour to excellent results.
If you want to see your picture featured here, head over to the Slashfood Flickr group, join us and add your pictures to our pool.
About a week and a half ago, I wrote a post about my mother's hunt for a yeasted lemon bread recipe. It was one that a neighbor used to make to ensure a prosperous New Year and while she had gotten the recipe from that neighbor, in the intervening 35 years, it had disappeared. Lucky for us, several of you offered up recipes you thought might be similar to what we were looking for in the comments section. My mom thought that the recipe for Vasilopita (Greek New Year Cake) that Jamie posted seemed pretty darn close to what she remembered and so, a couple of days ago, she whipped up a batch.
From the pictures she sent me, it appears to have turned out very well (unfortunately she had both loaves earmarked as gifts, so she didn't actually taste it). She did alter the recipe slightly, including the add-ins she remembered being in the batches her neighbor would bake and changing the amount of flour that gets added in the beginning. The recipe that resulted from her changes in after the break.
If you're a bread geek you know that the Baking World Cup is just around the corner. Properly known as the Coupe De Monde De Boulangerie, this is the Olympics of the baking world. It takes place every three years in Paris at the European exhibition, a major world bread, pastry, and catering expo. This time around it's scheduled for March 30 through April 1, 2008.
Started in 1992, the Baking World Cup gives the three competitors -- from twelve teams -- eight hours to make from scratch all of their breads. The each teammate is responsible for a specific category; baguette and specialty breads, vienoisserie (which is all of the croissant and puff pastry type breads), and artistic design (this person is spends the day making a showpiece from bread). This year there is an additional category called savory selection which requires that all three teammates work together to create a selection of savory rolls, pastries, and small sandwiches.
The Bread Bakers Guild of America sponsors Team USA at the Baking World Cup. It holds a series of competitions to find its next set of team members every three years, choosing the next team just before the current team competes. This gives the team three years to prepare. The members of Team USA competing in 2008 are Dara Reimers in artistic expression, Solveig Tofte in Baguette/Specialty breads, and Peter Yuen in Vienoisserie. Go Team USA!
Back in the early 1970's my parents lived in Santa Cruz, CA. They had a neighbor who would make a yeasted lemon bread for prosperity and good luck in the new year. My mom remembers it as being small round loaves that were sweet but not cake-y, with raisins and chopped nuts. At the time she did get the recipe, but in last 35 years, the scrap of paper on which the recipe was written has walked away.
She has an itch to make this bread again this year, but after much googling and flipping through cookbooks, we haven't been able to find anything that seems quite right. We know that this bread was traditional to whatever area of the world that this neighbor's family originally came from, but again, we don't know for sure. So, does this New Year's bread ring any bells for any of you out there? If so, we'd love to see your recipe! (Or, if you just have a really good recipe for a yeasted lemon bread with fruit and nuts, that would work too).
This last Monday night, just before I went to bed, I had an urge to start a batch of No-Knead bread. No-Knead bread has been on my mind a lot lately, mostly because somehow Lifehacker came across my post about it on my personal blog from last January and linked to it, making it the most hit-upon post in the history of that blog. So the recipe has been on my mind. I stirred up a batch that night, using yeast I had bought over the weekend, and went to bed.
The next afternoon, after about 14 hours of bubbling, my dough was nice and bubbly. I turned it out on to a board, folded it over on itself a couple of times and let it hang for another couple of hours. I preheated my pot (I used an oval cast iron pot that belonged to my grandmother. It's just a tiny bit small for the job, but creates a really nice shape) and when the two hours were up, I tossed my bread into the pot, put the lid on and slide it into the oven.
It's been about eight months since I last made this bread and I forgot how gorgeous it gets. I literally gasped when I took the lid off to brown up the top, because it was so perfect. So, I want to remind you all, once again, that you really should be making this bread. It's easy, it's tasty and it gives you a sense of satisfaction in the kitchen that is often hard-won. Oh, and if you need more convincing, Megan at Not Martha made it this week as well, incorporating tips from Cooks Illustrated into her batch.
Several months ago I came into temporary possession of a bunch of my great aunt's recipe cards. One of the recipes that was in the stack my cousin lent me is the one for challah that you see above. I was intrigued by it, especially since she had taken time to draw a diagram as to how you go about braiding the bread. However I didn't make it, instead tucking it away in the file folder that held the rest of my thesis research recipes.
Then I saw this post over on Two Fat Als, and the picture they posted of the gorgeous, burnished loaf of challah they had made recently and my heart started afluttering. I wanted to make challah. I've put this recipe down as one to try out this weekend, when I have a few minutes to spend kneading and hanging out as it rises. Challah is actually a great Saturday afternoon project because while it's wonderful fresh, it's even better dredged in an eggy batter and fried up into French Toast on Sunday mornings.
There are a lot of holiday's happening this month. One of the things that can connect them all is 
Good, fresh 
A year ago, I was totally swept along by the No-Knead bread tide. I thought it was the best thing ever and would often sing the praises of the technique, because for the first time in my life, I was able to make good bread easily. The only problem with it was that you had to be careful of the timing of when you started the bread, because of the specific waiting periods required. 
If you're a bread geek you know that the Baking World Cup is just around the corner. Properly known as the Coupe De Monde De Boulangerie, this is the Olympics of the baking world. It takes place every three years in Paris at the European exhibition, a major world bread, pastry, and catering expo. This time around it's scheduled for March 30 through April 1, 2008. 
I know what you're thinking: "toast? How many ways can there to make toast?"
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