Making bread

Here is how I bake roasted garlic and rosemary bread.  It is quite good, even if I do say so myself. 

First we need to roast the garlic.  Take several heads of garlic and slice the top of the cloves off.  I put mine in a baking dish lined with foil.  Leave extra foil hanging over to cover the garlic.

I oiled them with sunflower seed oil.  You can use olive oil too.  I then turned them over.

Seal the foil over the garlic.  Oh I should have told you to preheat your oven to 400 degrees.  Put the garlic in the preheated oven.

Set the timer for 35 minutes.



While we wait for the garlic to roast, pick some fresh rosemary, wash it under running water and pat dry.

Pull the leaves off the stems like in the picture.



Then chop finely.  You don't want big pieces in your bread.

Next I get some hard red wheat from my 5 gallon bucket in the pantry.

Put it in the top of my Nutrimill grinder.

Turn it on and a few minutes later.............

I have freshly ground whole wheat flour!

Now let's go check on that garlic in the oven, shall we?

Ooh, doesn't that look scrumptious?  The aroma  is lovely!

You just gently squeeze the cloves out of their paper shells.

And they are ready to use.

I have assembled my ingredients for the bread.  Sunflower oil, wheat gluten, agave, salt, flour, water and yeast.  And of course we have the roasted garlic and chopped fresh rosemary.

My handy dandy Bosch mixer.  This little jewel makes bread making simple and quick.

Here I have added 6 cups of warm water, 3/4 cup oil, 1/2 cup agave (or honey if you like) 2 heaping tablespoons of salt.

Next I add half the flour (about 7 cups) 1/3 cup wheat gluten, and 4 tablespoons of SAF instant yeast.

Mix on low speed and then gradually add the remaining 7-8 cups of flour.

I add this while the machine in running.  When you hear the motor slow down, turn it up to medium speed.

Set the timer once again for 10 minutes.  After putting the lid on the bowl of course.  But you knew that didn't you?  ;)  You of course can skip the mixer, and do this in a very large bowl.  Mixing and kneading by hand.  If you want to give it a try by hand I would definitely half the recipe.

Make sure you have spotlessly clean counter top.  Then I rub coconut oil on my counter. This prevents the dough from sticking to it.  I take the dough out of the mixer bowl and shape it into a large loaf.

Then I cut it into several balls.

Here is where I have added the roasted garlic and rosemary.  Had I not forgotten to add it to the mixer during the last minute of time, this would not have been necessary.  So I ended up working it in by hand.

One loaf on the far left, is plain without garlic and rosemary.  I used my french bread pan for two of the loaves.  The two little round ones are the girls'.  They always have to shape a small loaf when I bake.

Next I cover them with a flour sack towel and let them rise for about 25 minutes.

While the bread is rising, I wash up my mixer bowl and clean up the counter top.

After baking them for 25 minutes in a 375 degree oven this is how they come out.  Where is the other small loaf you ask?  Well it is at my Mother's house.  I ran out of room in my oven to bake all those loaves.  I always bake a loaf for my parents and this time I took it over unbaked.  Mom popped it into her oven and we both had fresh baked bread.

I rub the bread top with oil after it comes out of the oven.

I know you are wondering why in the world that one loaf resembles a whale with too many blow holes right?  Well I decided to stuff a few more cloves of roasted garlic in that one at the last minute.  I thought for sure it would bake up over the holes.  Nope!  Didn't happen.  That is okay, that whale loaf didn't last long anyway.  All of that bread has been eaten already.  Tomorrow I need to bake another batch of bread.  I will most likely make plain loaves and a couple of pizza crusts.

The next thing I will share with you is making jam.  I made 5 batches of berry jams just before I made this bread last week.  That is part of the reason the bread didn't last long.  Too easy to eat it with homemade jam!

Thanks for tuning in and watching my bread baking day.