Garlic Bread Twist

A couple weeks ago I wanted something to go with our dinner so I made this twisted garlic and herb bread and it was absolutely delicious. Sadly I didn't write down the exact recipe because I was just kind of testing it out and throwing things together but for the sake of this video I'm going to try and remember as hard as I can exactly what I did to recreate this really delicious garlic twisted bread which will be perfect for like barbecues alongside pastas or anything like that and especially now that we're going into spring and even summer I think this twisted bread doesn't just look really good but it's also just like the perfect thing to like bring with you if you're going to like a dinner party or a garden party or just a barbecue or something like that and it just tastes really good. So let me show you roughly what I did last time. Now the first thing we need to make is our yeast dough so we can get that proofing. Now normally I make a sweet yeast dough with lots of butter and sugar and an egg. This time we're switching things up since we want this to be a little bit more like a savory bread so we are using 250 milliliters of milk, one tablespoon of sugar, one teaspoon of salt, about 50 milliliters of olive oil. Again feel free to substitute this for butter. I find olive oil just works better in like savory bread. There we go. We're obviously also going to need some yeast. This is eight grams and last but not least 500 grams of flour. I'm just using all-purpose flour. Feel free to use whole wheat flour or do a mix of all-purpose flour and whole wheat flour. Now as per usual when we're making a yeast dough we're just going to start by activating the yeast with a little bit of sugar and some of our liquid, in this case milk. Feel free to also use water and while our yeast is blooming and activating and becoming bubbly and gross we can go ahead and add our remaining ingredients into our big mixing bowl as well. Our yeast is bubbly and gross we can just go ahead and add that into our bowl as well and we're basically just going to knead this together until we have a nice smooth dough. Again feel free to add a little bit of extra water if you're using a flour that just absorbs a little bit more water and if your dough is a little bit too sticky feel free to also add a little bit of extra flour as well. We'll see how this one turns out with just the oil. Usually I add butter and I usually add 100 grams of butter so we'll just see how far this goes and hopefully we have a really nice elastic not too sticky dough. Now my dough ball isn't as smooth as I normally like it to be. I think it's because I didn't add as much fat as I normally do. I wonder if last time I just used 100 grams of butter in my dough and no oil. I'm not sure I can't remember. We'll see how it turns out in the end. I think it'll be just fine after it's done proofing. I think it'll just be a little bit more of a bready texture rather than a brioche texture which the butter really helps kind of create. So if you do want more of like a brioche texture I would recommend using 100 grams of softened butter rather than 50 grams or 50 milliliters of olive oil. That being said we're going to cover this and let this proof for one to two hours. Again this might take a little bit longer or go a little bit quicker depending on where you're letting your dough proof. So if it's a little bit warmer it's going to prove quicker and if it's a little bit cooler where you're letting your dough proof it might just go a little bit slower. So just kind of keep an eye on it and once it's pretty much doubled in size we can go ahead and shape our lovely garlic twist. Our dough is pretty much done proofing so let's really quickly make our garlic filling. In my case I'm using a hundred grams of softened butter. Mine's pretty much completely melted. Either way works you basically just want to be able to mix everything in so don't use like really cold butter. I'm also going to be using three cloves of garlic. Again feel free to adjust add more or less garlic depending on how much of a garlic flavor you want. Lastly I'm also going to add a good pinch of salt and some Italian seasoning. Now if you have fresh herbs that's better like parsley, chives, some rosemary sometimes. Anything along those lines feel free to add that. Just chop it up and add it to your butter. I don't have any fresh herbs right now so I'm just going to use maybe like half a tablespoon of my Italian seasoning and that's just to add extra flavor. Again feel free to use Greek seasoning or fresh herbs or just leave it out and just use garlic instead. Totally up to you and if you're feeling really really fancy you can also make a garlic confit. I believe that's what it's called. I might be completely wrong but essentially you just cook your garlic in some olive oil in the oven until it gets really soft and that just gives you like a really nice intense delicious flavor. I'm too lazy to do that right now so I'm just going to use fresh garlic and grate it up on my little platter here and if you don't have any fresh garlic you can also just use garlic powder instead. It does the trick. Fresh garlic just gives you a little bit of extra flavor though. Okay we can put our butter aside for now and let's grab our dough and roll it out to a nice big rectangle. Let's grab our butter and essentially just spread it evenly all over our dough and now we just roll this up like we would with cinnamon buns as well and just make sure to roll it up a little bit tightly that way our layers are going to stick together just a little bit better and it's not going to be too loose when we cut it in half. But feel free to also leave a little tiny bit of air in between your rolls when you're rolling it up for your dough to expand. So I'm really just kind of letting it roll up itself. I'm not doing it too tightly but just tight enough that they stick together. Okay and now that we have our really nice long roll we're going to cut it all the way in half and then basically just twist our two strands together and this part can get a little bit messy. I'm gonna start here and you can already see like all the layers. Also add some grated cheese on top or even add some like grated parmesan into your garlic butter as well if you want a little bit of cheesiness in your dough. Personally I'm going to leave it like this and I'm going to cover this one more time for another like hour, hour and a half and then it's going to wander into the oven. It's been about an hour and a half I believe and our bread has definitely doubled in size. She smells very garlicky which is ideal. Now if you see that your ends are a little bit untucked I recommend just tucking it in a little bit because else when it's baking it's kind of going to come undone and it's just going to look prettier if everything is kind of tucked away and hidden and beautiful. There we go. This is going to go into the oven that's preheated to 180 degrees celsius or 360 degrees fahrenheit and it's going to bake for like 20 to 25 minutes. Again just kind of keep an eye on it. Obviously if your twist is a little bit bigger it's going to bake a little bit longer but if you decided to make like two smaller ones it's not going to bake as long. So again just keep an eye on it. Once it's kind of nice and golden in color and you think it's baked through just take it out of the oven and don't be alarmed if it starts leaking a little bit of the butter. That's actually quite helpful for us since we're going to use any butter that kind of leaks out of it once it's done baking and just kind of brush it on top and that's going to give it a really nice shine as well. And then if you just leave it on your tray the bread's essentially just going to soak up all the butter that kind of leaked out as it's cooling anyways. And there you have it there's our cooled off garlic twist and she looks really really gorgeous. So let's quickly cut into it and give it a quick little try. You can see all the beautiful layers. The outside is nice and crunchy but then the inside is really nice and soft. This would be really good with some tzatziki as well or dip it into like some other sauces or like the juices from your barbecued meat. I feel like that would be really good.