French Herb Bread

Bake-a-thon: Day 1
Bake of the day: French Herb Bread
It is December 1st and holiday season and count down to Christmas has already started. I have yet to bring my holiday decor out, will probably try and get everything done by the end of this week. I see the holiday lights already lit in some of my neighbors houses, hopefully we will have ours up soon too.
Christmas/ Holiday season means baking season for baking enthusiasts and I consider myself an eager enthusiast. So I've joined few of my blog buddies, led by the very lovely Valli, to do a Bake-a-thon, a month long baking event and we will be posting 3 times a week all through December with a linky tool to track all our baked treats.

I'm starting off the Bake-a-thon with a savory bread recipe. I've been baking bread almost every week for the past few months. We have stopped buying store bought bread because I had to try as many recipes as I can for this bake-a-thon event :-) The first thing I did was to collect all the recipes that I wanted to try and now I'm crossing off the ones I'm done with.
This French Herb Bread recipe is from King Arthur Flour Catalog. This is a very flavorful and easy to make bread. It is great for breakfast with some butter or cream cheese and tastes great in sandwiches too.

Ingredients:
All purpose flour - 2cups
Whole wheat flour - 1cup
Dry milk powder - 2tbsp
Potato flour - ¼cup (or use ½cup of dried potato flakes)
Herbes de Provence - 2tbsp
Instant Yeast - 1½tsp
Sugar - 1tsp
Salt - 1tsp
Lukewarm Water - 1¼cup
Olive Oil - 2tbsp

Method:

• Combine all the ingredients in a mixing bowl or the bowl of a stand mixer; mix and knead until smooth dough forms, adding additional water or flour as needed.
• Cover the dough and let rise for 1 hour.
• Shape the dough into a log and place it in a lightly greased 9"x5" loaf pan (read note below to see how to make mini loaves). Cover and let rise until the dough has  crowned bout 1" over the rim of the pan, 30minutes ~ 1 hour.
• Towards the end of the rising time, preheat the oven to 350°F.
• Bake the bread for 35~40 minutes or until an instant read thermometer inserted into the center of the bread registers at least 190°F.
• Remove the bread from the oven, turn it our onto a wire rack and cool completely before slicing.

Note:

• I added too much water by mistake and ended up adding more flour, which is why I got a 9"x5" loaf and a mini loaf that you see in the pictures.
• The same recipe can be made into 4 mini loaves -- that are perfect to wrap and give as holiday gifts. Divide the dough into 4 equal pieces after the first rise and form into 4 logs and place them in 4 mini loaf pans. Let rise until the dough has crowned about ½" above the rim of the pan. Bake for 30~35 minutes.

Linking this to this year's Bake-a-thon event.

Bake-a-thon 2014

An InLinkz Link-up