Pesto Bread

Again, left over cooked cereal makes great bread. Combined with left over homemade pesto it makes great savory bread. I used the exact same idea from the last bread post. The only addition was I spread a layer of homemade pesto onto the dough before I rolled it up and let it rise a second time. Now each slice has a bit of pesto. Not too much. Just enough.

Quick Beer Bread

We have lots of beer in our refrigerator. We're not big beer drinkers. We buy it when people come for dinner. Often it doesn't get drunk. So it sits in the refrigerator for months. It's taking up space. But not for long. I'm making beer bread until all the beer has vanished. Look out friends and co-workers - there's a beer bread in your future.Beer bread is so easy to make why didn't I think of it sooner? For this loaf I used Left Hand Brewing Co.'s Good JuJu, a seasonal offering brewed with real ginger. The ginger is very subtle even if drinking this straight but it's a complete non-issue once you cook with it. I found Farm Girl Fare's recipe for inspiration. Once you have the basic idea you can get very creative. I added fresh herbs because I had them. I can also see adding dried fruit, seeds, nuts, cheeses.

Ingredients:

2 cups white whole wheat flour
1 cup unbleached bread flour
1 Tablespoon granulated sugar
1 1/2 teaspoon salt
1 Tablespoon baking powder
14 ounces beer (or 12 ounces beer & 2 ounces water)
1 handful fresh dill, chopped
1 handful fresh cilantro, chopped
1 garlic close, minced

Pre-heat your oven to 375 degrees. In a large bowl combine all the ingredients. Slowly stir in the beer and mix until just combined. You will have a nice thick batter.

Spread this batter into a greased 8-inch loaf pan. I then drizzled a bit of olive oil over it. I baked this until a thin knife stuck in the center came out clean, about 45 minutes. And I turn the pan around about 20 minutes into baking because our oven is hotter in the back.

Let this cool in the pan on a rack for 10 minutes then slide it out of the pan onto the rack and let it cool about 10 more minutes. This bread tastes best warm but we also enjoyed it at room temperature and even toasted.

Flatbread Fever a la Turk: Gözleme

One of the many delicious Turkish foods we enjoyed on our recent trip was gözleme (GURZ-leh-MEH). You know how I love the flatbreads. Gözleme is the Turkish quesadilla and once you eat it you will want it all the time.

Gözleme is various fillings folded into lavaş (lah-VASH) bread then cooked on a griddle or skillet. ICheck out some of the videos on YouTube of women making lavaş and/or gözleme and see how incredibly thin they roll the dough. The women use long wooden dowels as rolling pins to create enormous disks that they flop onto a large circular griddle to cook. Fill it before you grill it and you have gözleme.

You can make gözleme at home on a smaller scale. The dough is simply flour, water, and salt. Rolling out the dough paper thin is a challenge. Just get the dough as thin as possible. The fillings are up to you. Traditional fillings are spinach and cheese or minced meat and cheese.

I did my best to recreate gözleme at home and we loved the results so I'll get plenty of practice.

For this batch I used half whole wheat flour and half white bread flour but white flour only is the norm. I used two cups total of flour (extra for dusting), about a teaspoon of salt, and about a cup of warm water. The measurements will vary depending on your method for scooping out flour, on the flour itself, the temperature and humidity in your house, etc. How many gözleme will two cups of flour make? That depends on how big you make them. Cut these measurements in half and start out real small if you're nervous. From this batch I made four gözleme.

Combine the salt and the flour then gradually add the water, stirring with a wooden spoon until the ingredients come together into something you can start working with your hands. Turn out the dough onto a floured surface and knead, adding a flour as needed, for about 5-6 minutes. Let the dough rest 15-30 minutes covered with a damp towel.

The more room you have for rolling the better but lack of space kept my gözleme small. Ideally, you make a square gözleme out of a round of dough. Roll out the dough as thin as possible, fold in teh top and bottom sidest (resulting in a capsule shape), spread the filling in the center, then fold in the left and right sides on top of each other to give you a square. Because of my small work surface, I kept my gözleme small and folded them into half-moon shapes - another perfectly acceptable shape in the world of gözleme.

I don't have access to the delicious, salty, slightly tangy cheese used in the gözleme we had in Turkey so I used feta along with spinach, chopped parsley, and freshly ground black pepper. If you are going to use meat or onion I suggest cooking those ingredients first because the you only cook the gözleme a few minutes. I used my largest non-stick pan on slightly above medium heat. The first side I cooked dry. After the first flip, I gave the gözleme a very thin brush of olive oil. Flip again and brush again with olive oil. Continue to cook until both sides have those toasty brown spots (eyes). Gözleme comes from the Turkish word göz, meaning eye.

Once out of the skillet, I cut mine with a pizza wheel. Serve immediately and often.

Dr. Atkins Be Damned!

You know, I'm still getting the hang of this food blog thing. I took great pains to create the blog entry regarding the bread making class I took but then posted it to bodanzarama in error. Taking the easy way out, I'll just direct you to that entry HERE.