Landlady likes my rosemary bread. She’s hosting a little get-together tomorrow and asked me to bake some. Glad I didn’t wait till tomorrow.
Rosemary is one of the very few non-native plants I’ve seen do well here. A hard winter will kill it, but the past few winters have been very mild so this patch is doing fine. Of course it’s all hard and woody, because we’re just coming out of winter. For baking you really want nice tender fragrant new leaves. So all in all not a great time for rosemary bread. Also, this reminds me that the whole patch needs a good trim to encourage new growth. So while I had the anti-cow wire open I went ahead and did that.
I was getting worried, but there was one corner of the patch where the leaves – if that’s what they’re called – weren’t hard like cardboard. No, I wasn’t planning to use all this for two loaves of bread. But I needed to go through quite a lot of it to find enough that wasn’t really tough.
Half an hour later…
Seriously, that took half an hour. Then I bruised the hell out of it with a rolling pin. Then I steeped it in hot water, so hopefully I’m not just baking lots of little hard things into the bread. Then I could make bread. What can I say? This isn’t a good time of year for rosemary bread.
But I think it’ll turn out to be pretty good. Certainly smells good.
Bet it will taste even better. How much rosemary did you use for 2 loaves? Did you add anything else besides the rosemary and I assume the soaking water to your usual recipe?
Perhaps my memory is not serving me, but doesn’t your bread recipe have a small amount of oil ? If you saute the rosemary leaves in some hot oil for a minute or two, the flavor will distribute pretty well.
Judy, it’s just the regular recipe except I steeped the rosemary in the water before proofing the yeast.
UnReconstructed: Welcome! Haven’t heard from you in a while. I like the idea of steeping it in olive oil, maybe. Bet that would be good. I’d need to make a bottle ahead of time, though, because the recipe only uses a glug of oil and there’s, I dunno, 4 or 5 tablespoons or more of rosemary here.