Adventures in Baking: Olive Oil Dough

Lately, my mother-in-law (who shall hence be known as "Karen" or "MIL" ;-) ) has been whipping up some phenomenal bread items. From scratch! With no bread machine! In seemingly no time at all! Fortunately for me and Jake, she revealed her secret to me and then bought me a copy of her secret.



The whole basis of this book is that you can make fantastic, specialty store type breads with very little time investment. They basically give you a recipe that makes roughly 4 loaves (or flatbreads or whatever) per batch. You can stick it in the fridge (for about 12 days) and tear off the appropriate amount to bake when you need to. On top of the basic dough recipe, they give you recipes for the dough.

The last two times I've been at my in-law's house, Karen has made a flatbread with onions and rosemary that has rocked my socks using the Olive Oil Dough recipe. So that was the first dough recipe that I was determined to tackle.

I mixed it all up in a giant tub that she gave me. Once you do that, it has to rise for 2 hours. But you literally do just that: mix it and then leave it for 2 hours.


Just prepared:

At 1 hour:

At 2 hours:


I decided to use the Prosciutto and Rosemary recipe in which you basically roll the dough out, put prosciutto and rosemary on top, roll that into a ball, and then re-flatten it so the meat and herbs are in the bread.

I forgot to take any pictures of the process, but I did snap one of the aftermath:

For a first batch, I think it was great. And obviously so did Spencer and Jake. Tonight I'm planning to tear off another hunk of dough and make the onion and rosemary flatbread. Bon Appetit!