Bread Sticks YUM!!!

Are you ready to Whip it up with us? Here's this week's whip it up Wednesday.

This week I found a recipe here of course it was from Pinterest that just made me giddy.  I was so excited to try it!  For many of the Utahans you’ll know what I’m talking about.  This recipe is for breadsticks like you get at Salt Lake Pizza Factory.  You know the twisty ones on a stick that are the real reason you go there (oh wait it’s the real reason I go there).

They really are like melt in your mouth fantastic breadsticks and how fun that they are twisted around a stick.

So once I found the recipe I had to try it.  I was really excited. And really they are easy so we know that’s a plus in my book.

Here what you need

1 Tbs yeast

2 Tbs Sugar

1 ½ C Warm water

1 Tbs Oil (Olive oil worked great)

1tsp Salt

3 ½ C Flour

¾ C Melted butter, divided

3/8 tsp garlic salt

½ tsp dried rosemary

1 Tbs Parmesan cheese

8-  ¼” wooden dowels, cut to 18” lengths (or 8 – 12” skewers – I used these but I won’t next time.  You need the longer length.)

First combine the yeast, sugar and warm water.  Let that sit for a few minutes to active the yeast.  I’m too lazy to measure the temp. of the water and my mom told me a great trick for the temp.  Just use water that is the temp. of what you would use in a bath.  So that’s what I do and it works every time!

Once the yeast is activated mix in the oil, salt and flour and knead for 5 minutes.  I put my dough in my kitchenaid mixer with the dough hook, but it wasn’t mixing well.  Maybe if I would have let it mix longer it would have eventually mixed in all the flour but I wasn’t very patient so I just started kneading it by hand. But it kind of seemed like maybe there wasn't enough dough to mix well.

Pull your dough out and spray / oil your bowl then put dough back in and bowl and turn once to coat with oil.  Then cover and let rise until double in size.  I then went for a nice Sunday drive with the hubby and I think that the dough actually ended up rising too much. (oops the Sunday drive may have not been the best idea I didn't get too many pictures)

Next split the dough into 8 sections.  And then grab the kids.  Let them help roll the dough into snakes about 16-18” long – This is where the longer sticks would be nice.  I had almost too much dough to fit on the 12” skewers.  Plus you don’t have handle for your bread stick if you use the skewers.

As you can see some of our "snakes" were struggling to become snakes.  Then you just need to roll them onto the skewers and use a little water at the ends to help the dough stay.  Again because I used the 12" skewers I had to squish the dough to get it all on the stick.  Which I think also resulted in the "falling" that happened during the next rise.  So you place the sticks over the edges of a pan and then let rise until double again.

Before baking use 1/4 C of melted butter and brush on bread sticks.

Bake on 375 degrees for 15-20 minutes.

While baking mix up the other 1/2 C melted butter with the garlic salt, rosemary and parmesan cheese.  use this mix to immediately spread over bread sticks when they come out of the oven!  YUMMMM!

Okay so these totally did not last very long at my house! They were downed pretty much before anything else made it to the plates.  But I need to tweak it just a little.  I used wheat flour instead of white so that kind of changed the taste.  Also I think the fact that I let the dough rise too long the first time and not having long enough sticks to wrap the dough, really contributed to the fact that my dough was really sagging.

It's a little embarrassing to show you this next pic but remember I told you I am NOT the cook right?

Ok see what I mean look at the 2nd one back it was sagging so much it was touching the pan.  But hey no worries it still tastes great!!

So next time you need a bread stick give these a try.  I promise you will like them!!

Thanks for stopping by
--Naoni