Good Bread for Lazy and Overachieving Bakers

How to make your house smell amazing: Roast Garlic for bread. So good - SO very good. Too bad I roasted garlic on a day we were having leftovers. This bread is pretty easy for a lazy baker... or an overachieving baker too. Roasting the garlic was the most complicated part of this bread. Mix the dough together and let it sit for a day - let it rise and get all funky, roll it around in some flour the next day, and plop it on some parchment into a blazing hot French oven (or Dutch depends on how international you are feeling). The instructions say to wait and hour until cutting. That was not something that we were willing to do. We cut into it and ate our fill. I think Bronwyn ate more bread than anything else that night. Plan ahead and enjoy some lazy bread.

Rosemary and Roasted Garlic Artisan Bread

Ingredients:
Roasted Garlic
1 head garlic
Extra-virgin olive oil
Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Slice the garlic head in half. Drizzle the exposed cloves with olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Wrap in foil and roast on a baking sheet at 400º for 40 minutes. Let cool, remove cloves from their skins and set aside.

Bread

1½ cups water, room temperature
1 teaspoon active dry yeast
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
3 cups bread flour
½ teaspoon dried oregano
½ teaspoon sea salt
1 whole head roasted garlic (smashed)
2 teaspoons finely chopped rosemary (plus more to sprinkle across the top)

Rosemary and Roasted Garlic Artisan Bread

Preparation:
Add the yeast to the water and let sit for 10-15 minutes until the yeast starts to foam. While the yeast is activating, stir together flour, salt and oregano in a large mixing bowl.
Add yeast mixture and all remaining ingredients to the bowl and mix together just until combined. The dough should look a little sticky and stringy and there should still be a little flour around the edges of the bowl. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let it sit somewhere warm for 8-24 hours.
When you're ready to bake your bread, preheat oven to 450° with a Dutch oven or covered baking dish inside the oven. At this point your dough should be puffy and have risen to almost level (or higher) with the top of the bowl.
While the oven is preheating, transfer your dough to a floured surface. Adding more flour as needed, gently fold the dough into itself several times just until a flour-covered ball is formed. Transfer dough to parchment paper and let it sit until the oven is pre-heated (~20 minutes).
Remove baking dish from oven and transfer the dough, still on the parchment, into the dish. Cover and bake for 30 minutes, then remove cover and bake for 15-20 minutes more. Your bread will be done once the top is browned. Using parchment edges, lift bread from baking dish and transfer to cooling rack to let cool for up to an hour before slicing.