What you need?
All purpose flour: 2 cups
Sugar: 1 tbsp
Salt: ½ tsp
Oil: 3 tbsp
Instant yeast: 2 tsp
Lukewarm milk or water (for kneading): ¾ cup or as needed
For the garlic herb
spread:
Butter (salted): 3 tbsp
Chopped coriander: 1 tbsp
Chopped mint: 1 tsp
Pepper powder: 1 tsp
Chilli flakes: 1 tsp
Basil (fresh or dried): 1 tsp
Finely chopped garlic: 3-4 pods
How to create it?
The garlic herb
spread:
Bring butter to room temperature. Once the butter is creamy
in the room temperature add in all the other ingredients and mix. The spread is
ready.
The bread:
Since I used the instant yeast here I added it directly to
the flour without proofing but if you are using dry yeast you’ll have to proof
it first.
For proofing the yeast:
mix the sugar with 1/4th of the lukewarm water/ milk in a bowl. Next
add in the yeast to the sugar solution. Cover the bowl with a kitchen cloth and
let it rest of 10-15 min. After 10 min your yeast mixture is proofed if you
notice frothy bubbles. Now this is ready to go into the flour.
- For those using instant yeast like me, take a deep big bowl, add in the flour.
- Next add salt, sugar, oil and instant yeast. Mix them well.
- Now pour the milk or water, little by little and knead into dough.
- In the beginning the dough will feel sticky so don’t shy away from adding some more flour to ease your kneading.
- While making any bread dough, the more you stretch the better it is as the gluten strands get stretched which helps the bread to rise. That’s why I prefer kneading it in a flat surface on the kitchen counter as it gives me lot of space for stretching the dough.
- After kneading for some good 15-20 min you’ll see the dough no more sticks to your hands. It means your dough is now ready to rise.
- Rub oil all over the dough and let it rest in a greased bowl for 1 ½ hour. Do cover the bowl with a kitchen towel.
- After 1 ½ hours your dough would rise to double.
- Now take the dough out of the bowl and punch it gently to take out the air.
- Lightly dust the surface with some flour and roll the dough into a square or rectangle shape of about 1mm thickness with a rolling pin.
- Spread the garlic herb mixture we made before on top of the rolled surface.
- Now with a sharp knife, cut the dough into ribbon like long stripes. Make sure all the stripes are of equal size.
- Suppose you have made 5 stripes- stripe 1, stipe 2, stripe 3, stripe 4 and stripe 5.
- Now carefully pull out stripe 2 and place it on top of stripe 1, similarly pull out stripe 3 and place it on top of stripe 2, and likewise, stripe 4 goes on top of stripe 3 and stripe 5 will go on top of stripe 4.
- So now we have placed all the stripes on top of each other.
- Now cut the heap of stripes into equal square pieces and place horizontally into a greased loaf pan.
- Cover the loaf pan with a kitchen cloth and let it rise again for 1 ½ hours.
- Once the dough is double again, brush the top with milk and bake it in a pre-heated oven at 180 degrees for 25 minutes.
- After 25 minutes your bread top will turn golden brown. This is the time to take it out of the oven and de-mold immediately into a cooling rack.
- Unlike cakes, for breads de-molding should be done immediately or else the base will get soggy
- Let the bread cool for 20 minutes in the cooling rack so that air passes through all the sides.
- Viola your bread is ready to be indulged!
[This bread tastes
better when eaten fresh but you can store it in your fridge for 2 days. You can
re-heat for 1 minute or so before eating]
P.S: Since I was
running short of time so I couldn’t click step by step images. But soon I will
update this post with the step by step pictures for better understanding of the
recipe. Till then stay tuned! :)
