HB in Five Pesto/Pine Nut Bread

The bread for this HBinFive bread braid is pesto pine nut bread.  Don't they look yummy?

And this is my homemade pesto.  I grow a lot of basil and it makes A WHOLE LOT OF PESTO, which we love.  I use it for pasta, spreads, and now for bread.  I make so much pesto that the ice cube tray freezing method is too small for me.  My pesto gets poured into 9 x 13-inch pans and frozen, then I remove the whole block and cut it into chunks (like these) and freeze them in freezer bags.  I need more than a few cubes for most recipes. 
  
When I saw that the next bread for HBinFive used pesto I was thrilled.  Another chance to use that frozen pesto! This dough was a little dry, but the crumb turned out nicely and the crust was very crunchy.  I made 12 small rolls with 1/2 of my batch which started out a 1/2 recipe.  The rolls didn't have much oven spring.   I put them on parchment which I removed
halfway through the baking time to crisp the crust on the baking stone.  You might want to make sure all of your pine nuts are tucked in the dough.  They have a lot of oil and will burn and taste bitter if they are on the outside of the roll.  I had to pick some burned ones off.

We liked this recipe a lot.  We ate the rolls with homemade tomato soup (made and frozen this fall from my heirloom tomatoes).  Tomatoes and pesto; a match made in heaven!

I had enough dough left over to make this a few days later.

Originallly, the dough was dry (maybe my climate) so I added more water to the dough and waited for a few days.  Then I thinly rolled out some dough, brushed it with some good extra virgin olive oil and transferred it to the peel. I baked it on my stone for 10 minutes and then topped it with a sprinkling of white cheddar cheese (because I discovered at the last minute that my leftover mozzarella had gone bad), and some coursely ground salt and fresh ground pepper.  I have a lot of dehydrated tomatoes from my garden in my larder so those got re-hydrated, diced finely and scattered on top.  The bread baked another 5 minutes to melt the cheese.  It was crispy and full of flavor.

DELICIOUS!!!

  This dough will appear in my kitchen as bread or pizza again and again. 

 Click the HBinFive

 link and go to Michelle's site to link to other member's blogs and check out their breads.