Rosemary and (33 cloves of) Roasted Garlic Bread

 After making the no-knead bread that we cooked in the dutch oven, Joey wanted to try making other similar breads. He found a recipe for a bread that also included roasted garlic and rosemary - um how can you go wrong there? This was modeled after the Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day recipe, which I've made in the past. When we were going to be making it, my job was to start roasting the garlic as soon as I got home from lab. I asked Joey how much garlic he wanted, since at the time, we just had a giant bag (from Sam's Club) of peeled cloves. His exact words were - a bunch, err on the large side. I just picked the first number that came to my mind, and said okay, 30? He said to go with that, and jokingly added, that if he counted only 29, he was going to make me do it over. With that, I responded - for that, I'm doing 33. Once I got home, I actually counted out 33 cloves, and roasted them until they were mellow and sweet. And we used every single one of them in the bread.

To make the bread, Joey followed the instructions from the Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day website, which said to pull off a 1lb chunk of the dough. It turned out that 1lb of dough isn't quite half, so the first loaf was much smaller than the second. The first loaf also didn't have nearly as many garlic cloves - whoops! At first we thought they must have just disintegrated into the dough, but once we cooked the second loaf a few days later, we saw where they all went!

Recipe: Rosemary and Roasted Garlic Bread
Adapted slightly from Noble Pig
Yield: 2 loaves of bread

Ingredients:
33 cloves of garlic (use less if you don't love garlic as much as we do. Although, why would you be making this recipe if you don't love garlic?)
olive oil
2 tbsp active dry yeast
3 cups lukewarm water
5 1/2 cups (29.3 oz) bread flour, plus more for dusting
1 1/2 tbsp kosher salt
2 tbsp chopped fresh rosemary
Cornmeal

Directions:
Preheat oven to 450 F. Make a pouch out of heavy duty foil (or make a double layer out of regular foil). Put the garlic in the pouch, drizzle with olive oil, and close up tightly. Put in the oven and cook for 45 minutes, or until golden and a fork easily goes through them. Let cool slightly.

In a large (very large) container, mix water and yeast together. Add flour, salt, roasted garlic and rosemary. Stir with a wooden spoon, use your hands as necessary to fully mix together. Cover the container and set in a warm place to rise for at least 3 hours. At this time, put in the refrigerator overnight - the dough is easier to work with when cold.

When ready to bake, put a metal baking pan on the bottom of the oven. Fill it with water. Put a pizza stone on a rack set in the middle or top third of the oven. Preheat oven to 450 F, the water and stone will heat up during this time.

Sprinkle a pizza peel with cornmeal. Sprinkle the dough and your hands with flour. Divide the dough into two loaves (or you can just pull out half of the dough and bake the other half later), shaping each into a ball. Place on the pizza peel and let rest for 30 minutes. Right before placing in the oven, score the tops of the balls with either an X or several cuts - this will prevent the bottom of the loaf from splitting.

Use the pizza peel to (carefully!) slide the dough right onto the hot pizza stone. Bake for 30 minutes. Remove from oven and let cool for 15 minutes before slicing.

First loaf

Second loaf