Spring Bread

A recipe from cooking-ez.com

For 5 loaves, you will need:

• 1 250 g Parmesan (Parmigiano Reggiano)
• 2 250 g Preserved tomatoes
• 3 chives
• 4 pepper
• 5 1 kg bread dough
• Total weight: 1,500 grams

Times:

Preparation	Resting	Cooking	Start to finish
1 hour 35 min.	1 hour 50 min.	40 min.	4 hours 2 min.

Step by step recipe

• 1:

  Prepare the flavouring mixture

  
  Cut 250 g Parmesan (Parmigiano Reggiano) into small dice and put in a bowl.
• 2: Drain 250 g Preserved tomatoes and cut into small pieces. Add to the bowl.
• 3: We will only be using the chive flowers.
• 4: Pull apart the flower heads directly over the bowl and discard the stalks, which are very tough.
• 5: Take off all the flowers like this.
• 6: Pour 2 or 3 tablespoonsful of the oil from the preserved tomatoes into the bowl, salt and pepper, then mix everything together.
  Note: if you cannot drain any oil off the preserved tomatoes, use herb olive oil or, if you have nothing else, plain olive oil.
• 7:

  Flavour the dough

  
  Put 1 kg bread dough into a food-processor bowl and tip the flavouring mixture in on top.
• 8: Knead for 2 or 3 minutes, just until evenly mixed in.
• 9:

  Make the loaves

  
  Gather the dough into a ball and transfer to a large, clean bowl, covered with a plastic sheet.
  Leave to rest for 1 hour.
• 10: Tip the dough out onto a floured worktop.
  Weigh out lumps of dough of about 300 g.
• 11: Shape into balls, cover with a plastic sheet and leave to rest for 20 minutes.
• 12: Roll the balls into short French sticks.
  See the baguette recipe for more details in a video.
• 13: Lay the sticks in the moulds or tins.
  Cover with a sheet of plastic and leave to rest for 1 hour 30 minutes.
• 14:

  Bake the loaves

  Preheat the oven to 460°F (240°C).
  Slash the tops of the loaves and bake for about 40 minutes.
  Note: As when baking any bread, you should ensure that the oven is filled with steam for the first 15 minutes of baking. This page shows you how; it really is the secret of golden-brown, crusty loaves..
• 15: Leave to cool before turning out.

Remarks

You can add a few finely chopped chives in with the flowers.
For the bread dough, I suggest you use the french baguettes recipe.
You might also like to take a look at this page all about bread.

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