My virgin Bread attempt

There are two heavenly food smell that I especially enjoy. One is the shameless 'Free Smells' marketing gimmick by Famous Amos where I would often end up buying a heck load of cookies. The other is the smell of fresh bread baking at the bakery.

Last night saw me attempting to bake my very own herb bread which ended up pretty fantastic. I couldn't be bothered to actually follow the recipe from the book as it seemed too much work so I improvised. Starting at 1am in the morning and the bread came out of the oven at 4.30am, smelling like a slice of heaven itself. In a split second, I was scarfing down a piping hot slice like a hungry Somali refugee.

The bread was slightly on the dense side with an agreeable crunchy crust. With a fat slice of cheddar and a thick slice of steak sandwiched in between a couple of slices of this bread, eating at Subway is never going to be the same again.

Ingredients

1 packet of dry yeast (11g)
500g of bread flour
300ml warm water
salt (fine)
pepper
mixed herbs
butter

Mix the warm water with the yeast. Make sure the water is not too hot or it will kill the yeast.
Sieve the flour and salt together into a big bowl. Add in the yeast mixture, pepper and herbs and mix with a wooden spoon until it becomes a sticky dough ball.
Cover the bowl with a damp cloth and leave for 2 hours or until it has doubled in size.

Preheat the oven to 175 degrees Celcius
After letting the dough rise, mix in a little flour into the mixture and start to knead the dough for 10 mins. All the time, keep adding in flour until the mixture becomes non-sticky.
Place it into a clean bowl and cover for another 10 minutes.
Finally place dough onto greased pan and place in oven for 30 mins.

Tips:

You can add olives and sun-dried tomatoes to the bread to make it even better tasting.
For a glistening golden crust, brush the bread with beaten egg yolk before baking.