Heavy, dense, powerful Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese,
Thick, heavy, powerful deli bacon,
Intense, condensed, powerfully flavored sun-dried tomatoes.
Combined with yeast bread and over-proofed then baked twice to produce feather-light breadsticks that literally melt in your mouth with an explosion of flavor spread by the moisture of your own saliva. Bite into one and it disappears, and you're all what, WHAT WHAT just happened inside my mouth? Where did it go? Then boom, the flavor is spread all over you mouth to every nick and cranny inside there. Food isn't supposed to be like this, yet here it is.
I urge you to try this. Get your kids involved or your grandkids. It's fun. Like Play-Doh.
There are three tricks that come into use.
1) Lots of fat. Flavorful fat. The cheese is considered a fat, and the bacon is fatty. Use all of that and supplement with olive oil cooked with the bacon to get the bacon to crisp evenly and flavor the oil intensely. ALL of the flavor in expensive bacon is spread throughout the dough. Oil makes things light and when baked twice oil makes things crispy.
2) Process bacon and tomato and even cheese to dust with some of the flour to capture every atom of flavor.
3) bake the breadsticks in batches 10 minutes at 375℉. At this point they're like bread. Then lower the temperature to 250 and bake them all again for 20 minutes to dehydrate them.
If the the breadsticks are rolled and cut thinly then they tend to bend as they bake and dry out, but when they're rolled thickly like these are then they hold their shape better. These thick ones are every bit as light as the thin ones.
This was a large batch beginning with 2 cups of hot water, and that determines the rest. Rarely do I ever use 2 teaspoons of yeast, but I wanted these to go good and fast, and do heavy lifting with all the heavy elements I'm adding. It's not necessary because yeast multiplies exponentially, but I did it anyway.
Also, although a large batch I didn't want to mess around with a million thin breadsticks. And I only have five sheet pans and four plastic storage boxes that I used for proofing. Plus I was lazy yesterday and I didn't want to keep rolling out dough and cutting thin ones that would require extra makeshift tinfoil trays and makeshift cling wrap covers.
I used to break off small amounts of dough and roll out snake shapes, and that's a major pain in the beau-tox so recently I bought a pizza cutter wheel and that works very nicely on dough rolled out to a rectangular pizza shape.
Come to think of it, this combination of flavors, intense tomato, intense cheese and intense bacon does taste like pizza. What a BUMMER! That's not what I was aiming for. These flavors without the tomato and in moderation are a lot more elegant.
Also chipotle powder, Held back a bit, so that it doesn't stick out.
I suppose garlic would work too.
Or any dry herb.
The dough is divided in half for two batches.
A smaller batch cut to pencil-thin sticks can be rolled out all at once.
Breadstick pagoda ↑.
I'm short one baking tray
and two plastic storage boxes for proofing.
These are unbelievable. I cannot keep off them. It's ridiculous, it's like 5 cups of flour and I cannot keep off them. They'll be gone in just a few days.
They're terrible for one's diet. I'll have to give some away.
