HBinFive October 15th Bread Braid

This was a pleasant assignment, baking three rustic Italian style recipes with the Master Dough, using lots of herbs.

I made an herbal arrangement to place on my kitchen table, and as I worked my way through the recipes, I went over and picked what I needed, or reached into the cherry tomato bowl in one instance.

The Whole Grain Pizza recipe is intended for the grill, but we've slowed down with our grilling. It was also a week night and the usual rush-rush, so my pizza baked in the oven. It was very simple with canned, chopped tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, a few olives, and basil.

The Garlic-Studded Baguette recipe gave an alternate of using cherry tomatoes instead of garlic, which I chose since we still have our own coming in. When I took it out of the oven, I laughed because the swelled and irregular shape of the loaf with the tomatoes perched on the top looked like someone's belly bursting open the buttons on their shirt!

After shaping the baguette, the directions say to use the handle of a wooden spoon to make a well across the loaf and then to press your garlic or tomatoes in there. My dough kept bouncing back, so I didn't get much of a trough, hence the bursting buttons.

The use of tomatoes here was decorative. I imagine garlic would have infused the loaf (but I'll find out from my baker friends how that worked). We enjoyed this with a pasta with fresh herbs.

The Grissini smelled heavenly while baking. All that rosemary! O. ate four of them for breakfast this morning. I doubled the batch, having a feeling that we would enjoy these. I keep thinking of that stunning photo of these in the book.