As some of you may know, I love my crockpot and bread machine. They have saved a lot of money and a lot of time. Time better spent writing. For crockpot recipes I highly recommend Stephanie O’Dea. I love her Make it Fast, Cook it Slow recipe books. You can also find a lot of the recipes in those books on her website.
For bread, I recommend The Bread Lover’s Bread Machine Cookbook. However, I’ll be honest, for bread recipes I mostly just look on the internet. Today I’d like to share the recipe I use the most. I believe I got this off the internet, but I won’t swear to it. It’s a very basic recipe. I use it mostly for breadsticks, but it works as bread or rolls as well.
Basic White Bread Recipe
1 cup water
2 tablespoons of sugar
2 tablespoons of olive oil
1 teaspoon of salt
3 cups of all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons of bread machine or quick rise yeast
Now depending on what I want to do with it I choose a cycle. You can use just the basic bread cycle, but I mostly use this for breadsticks so I use the dough cycle. Once the dough is done I divide the dough ball in half and then divide each of those dough balls in half. I keep dividing the dough in half until I end up with 16 little dough balls. I then roll them out with my hand into cigar shaped lumps of dough. Then I place them in the oven on 350 degrees and cook for 18-20 minutes. Once the dough is out of the oven I coat them with my garlic butter mixture.
Garlic Butter Mixture
1/4 cup of butter melted in the microwave (about 20-30 seconds)
a dash of garlic powder
a dash of garlic salt
a dash of Italian seasoning
I simply mix up the butter mixture and brush them on the baled breadsticks and …wa la. Breadsticks as good as Olive Garden when Olive Garden doesn’t over cook them. These are better than Olive Garden breadsticks that are too done 😉