Monday, November 27, 2017

cheese and bacon breadsticks

It's 3:30 in the morning and I'm up making breadsticks while thinking about you.

It's true.

I only have 3 plastic storage bins available right now so that determines the target amount.

Roughly estimated the amount of flour will equal the amount of water by weight while the ingredients are handled by volume. So 1 + 1/2 cup of water (8oz + 4oz) will take 3 cups of flour (3 X 4oz), give or take. That will make 1 Lb + 10 oz dough. If numbers mean anything.

Cheese grated finely to taste. Cheese has salt.

Bacon fried to crisp in amount to suit your taste, processed to dust along with 1/2 cup of the flour so the machine doesn't clog up.

Bacon grease to suit yourself. Instead of butter. Bacon has salt.

Cayenne, or chipotle, or Thai chile, or hot Hatch chile powder to taste.

More salt to flavor all that flour and water. With the salt in the cheese and bacon in mind.

Best results when you don't overdo any of these flavor ingredients. Hints of these flavors that has people wondering what's in them is better than being smacked in the mouth with the flavors. And with less additions then the breadsticks can be baked light as balloons. The more you put in then the heavier they'll be.

So then, less than a cup of top cheese with strong flavor grated finely. Three bacon strips will do it. A few tablespoons of bacon fat. A mere level teaspoon of powdered chile. And less salt than you might think.

Dough pieces picked off in groups of 10 and each piece rolled out to the width of  pencil and length of the baking trays. By pure chance and calculation this batch turned out 31 stretched worm shapes.

Baked. Baked again. Baked again until the breadsticks are dry. There is an unhappy difference between dried and stale. If left in the air to dry they will not be as nice.




Another technique works very well.

Roll out the dough to a rectangle the size and shape of your trays.

Allow the flat rolled rectangle to rise about halfway then slice long strips across it using a pizza cutter. Place the strips on a tray with sufficient spacing to allow them to rise fully. So one rolled out rectangle should fill two trays.

Yo, Breadsticks you're so fine, you're so fine you blow my mind.

Caution: highly addictive.

So I'll be shooting these up,  I meant to say eating them, continuously until they are gone.

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