During my recent travels (and probably my last travels for a while), I found myself in London at some swanky bar trying to find a sip of alcohol untainted by a massive pub crowd. I ordered some cocktail with a flower in it for 25 pounds, and it arrived at the table with a flower vase filled with different varieties of breads, mainly in stick form. The one I found most bizarre was essentially just a bunch of olives surrounded by a loose dough. They really were weird. Like, they were barely bread, and yet clearly bread sticks. I love olives, and these are basically olives that have been tossed into pizza dough. I don’t know how else to describe them. Anyway, I did some research and found that these are an English creation, and not some ancient Italian specialty as I had initially assumed. I found a recipe online for them, and immediately resolved to make them myself with some slight, but incredibly convenient, modifications to the method, as well as the addition of garlic, which really helped to cut the saltiness of the olives.
They turned out great. For me, as the baker, the best part is that the width along each bread stick does not end up being uniform, so some of the thinner parts can burn and give a great wood fired pizza flavor and a really satisfying crunch, while the thicker parts remain pillowy and chewy. The dough is broken up by olives, which can be super salty, but since the dough doesn’t really have any flavor of its own (other than “oven flavor” as I like to call it), they are 100% necessary. I opted to use garlic-stuffed olives, which ended up being a game changer. In some places, there is no olive and only garlic, and when they’re fresh out of the oven that garlic is soft and caramelized, and it’s really just a whole different experience. The garlic does harden back into an essentially raw clove later on, so I think I want to experiment in the future with a version that has pre-cooked garlic, but for these, the raw garlic that came stuffed in the olives got the job done.
The other cool part of this recipe is that it makes like 50 bread sticks. it’s honestly a lot. For me, all 50 of those bread sticks are essential to my daily happiness, but for others it is super easy to simply half the recipe. It’s all extremely scale-able. Shockingly, there is no butter in this recipe, but in my next version with the cooked garlic, I’m going to try to also include some kind of Indian spice, and brush the bread sticks with ghee, so not to worry: the butter is on its way!
Butter Count: 0 Tbsp
INGREDIENTS:
1 kg bread flour
20 g salt
20 g fast acting dry yeast
800 mL water, room temp, separated
4 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1 kg garlic-stuffed olives from a jar, well drained and patted dry
fine pastry flour for dusting
INSTRUCTIONS:
Read this entire recipe before starting.
Add the flour to the bowl of a stand mixer fit with a dough hook. Add the salt to one side of the flour; add the yeast to the other. Pour in 600 mL of water.
Turn the mixer on low speed. When the dough starts to clump up, add the rest of the water, mixing continuously. Increase the speed to medium and mix an additional ~7 minutes until the dough is wet and stretchy.
Add the olive oil (it will seem like a lot), and mix an additional 2 minutes until the oil is absorbed but the mixture is still wet.
Remove the bowl from the mixer. Add the olives. Stir with a rubber spatula until the olives are well incorporated.
Grease two large glass bowls with oil. Place half of the dough in each bowl and cover them with plastic wrap so that the wrap is tight across the top of the bowl, not touching the surface of the dough, leaving room for the dough to expand. Leave to expand about 1 hour at room temp.
Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Set aside.
Heavily flour a clean work surface with the fine pastry flour. Dump one of the bowls onto the flour. Slice it in half with a knife and return one half to the bowl (this will make it easier to work with the dough).
The dough will be essentially liquid still, but don’t worry. Flour the top of the dough, and stretch it with your fingers into a rough square or rectangle, about a centimeter thick, careful not to tear it. Slice the dough into strips (it doesn’t matter if you slice along the long or short side of the rectangle). As you slice, try to cut some of the olives in half, keeping as close to a straight line as you can.
Preheat the oven to 425F.
Roll the strips onto the parchment paper, about 2 inches apart from one another. Each strip will not be uniform in width along its entirety - it’s fine.
Bake, two baking sheets at a time if desired (recommended), about 12 minutes. Some thin parts of the strips will get very brown and crunchy, but don’t take them out until the wider parts of the strips become golden; This takes some practice, so I find it best to bake the first sheet with only a few strips on it, and see how it goes, and adjust the baking time for the rest of the sheets from there.
Transfer the strips to a wire rack to cool, then repeat steps 7-8 and 10-12 with the remaining dough halves.
NOTE: In the end there will be about 50 bread sticks, so it helps to use 3 or 4 baking sheets on rotation, re-using the parchment parchment paper on each sheet to reduce waste.