Delicious Dishes: Pesto Bread

You MUST make this pesto bread! Here is why:

1. It's super easy, requiring only a mixing of ingredients, 8 minutes of kneading, 2 hours of rising and some spreading of pesto and parmesan.

2. It's beautiful. By rolling it up like a jelly roll, slicing it down the middle and braiding it, it comes out looking like a professional made it. The recipe even has a full page of pictures of a how-to.

3. It's delicious. It's like garlic bread's grown-up, sophisticated cousin. I could eat this every day and not tire of it.

Baking bread!

Ladies and gentleman, I present to you my biggest accomplishment to date: I made bread from scratch! Baking bread has been on my bucket list for a few years now and I never just buckled down and tried it. I'm so glad I did!

Truth be told I used the recipe and method from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. It was so simple! The only needed ingredients were yeast, water and salt. The recipe makes three loaves and you can store the dough in the fridge for up to two weeks, so you can have fresh bread whenever you want. Next up: Experimenting with more recipes in the book, as well as the more difficult ones in The Breadbaker's Apprentice.

You can listen to Peter Reinhart's TED talk on the art of baking bread here.