Bake Me a Bread!!

Saturday, August 7th, 2010

One of the most wholesome goodness feeling is to do something from scratch and it turned out to be better than what you would have imagined. This time, I'm talking about baking your own bread. And not only just any bread. It's a bread with full of wonderful fresh herbs that you get from your very own garden. Well, this is the bread that I baked last week - Fresh Herb Bread. A recipe taken from Betty Crocker Bread Machine book.

Half-way through the kneading process, the power tripped and the bread machine came to a halt. I was kind of upset since I've never bake a bread the 'old-fashion' way before. I thought that 'oh no, there goes my bread!. What do I do now?' However, since I read a lot on culinary stuff and watching Astro Food Channel, I put my little 'knowledge' (if you can call it that) to use and took the dough out from the machine and tried my hand at making the bread the 'old-fashion' method. Well, thanks to the power failure, I finally discovered that I do have some 'talent' at making bread without the bread machine! Haahaa...

Fresh Herb Bread

Makes 1 1/2 pound recipe

1 cup plus 2 tbsp water

2 tbsp butter, softened

3 cups bread flour

2 tsp chopped fresh sage leaves

1 tbsp chopped fresh basil leaves

1 tbsp chopped fresh oregano leaves

2 tsp chopped fresh thyme leaves

1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley

3 tbsp dry milk

2 tbsp sugar

1 tsp sal

1 1/2 tsp yeast

Place all ingredients in the bread machine pan in the order recommended by the manufacturer.

Select Basic/White cycle. Use medium or light crust color. Remove baked bread from pan and cool on wire rack.

Fresh herbs are so aromatic, refreshing and easy to get. If you don't have all of the herbs mentioned above, you can use any herbs that you can find. Since I have quite a collection of herbs in my garden, I decided to go with Rosemary, Sage, Dill, Oregano and Thyme. If you are not sure what these herbs are and how they look like, here are some photos taken from my Herb Garden.

Rosemary

Oregano

Thyme

Sage

Dill