Today is the final day of this Mega Marathon. It has been an awesome one month with the frangrance of yeast wafting around my kitchen and sometime my entire house. It has been a month of constantly cleaning the mixing bowl and measuring cups to start the bread for the next alphabet. I was tempted to go with Zopf for this last bread of the month but the pull apart bread has been on my to-bake list for ever now. So I did some realignment and adjustment and finally came up with zaatar pull apart bread.

I first tried tweaking another recipe and wanted to make a savory monkey bread type of pull apart in which I stuffed zaatar flavoured paneer. The taste was amazing but the pull apart kind of went fell apart. The individual rolls tasted great but due to all the butter coating the dough they simply did not stick to each other and literally fell apart. So I abandoned that and then found this recipe in which the filling was simply zaatar and olive oil. That sounded more manageable and so I went ahead with it. But I did not want to take any more risks and so I topped the dough with cheese just before going in to bake so that it holds the various pieces of dough together. In doing that I had to sacrifice the look of the bread and the rolls are not individually visible in the bread. Maybe I am better next time.

Country – England

Makes one 10″ loaf

Recipe adapted from here

WHAT WE NEED

For the dough

All purpose flour             1 1/2 cups

Instant yeast                     1 tsp

Sugar                                  1 tsp

Olive oil                             1 1/2 tsp

Salt                                      1 tsp

Curds                                  1/4 cup

Milk                                     4-5 tbsp

For the filling

Zaatar spice mix               5-6 tbsp

Olive oil                              5 tbsp

Milk for glaze                    2 tbsp

Mozzarella cheese           2 tbsp (optional)

WHAT TO DO

• Mix all the ingredients for the dough and knead well for 8-10 minutes till the dough becomes soft and pliant
• Set aside in a covered greased bowl till the dough doubled in volume
• Mix the zaatar spice and olive oil in a bowl and set aside
• Once the dough has doubled, divide it into 4 quarters
• Divide each quarter further into 4 pieces
• Roll out 1 of the 4 pieces into a 6″ diameter circle
• Apply the zaatar and olive oil mix on the circle
• Roll out the next piece and place it on the first piece and apply the zaatar mix on it
• Repeat the process for the other 2 pieces and you will have a stack of 4 circles with zaatar mix in between all of them
• Roll up the 4 circles together into a log and pinch the ends together to seal

• Repeat the process for each of the other 3 quarters of dough
• You will have 4 logs of dough
• Cut each log into 4-5 pieces making diagnol cuts like a ‘V’
• Grease a 10″ round pan
• Place all the cut pieces in the round pan with the cut side facing up
• Cover and set it aside for an hour to increase in size

• Preheat the oven to 200C
• Brush the top of the dough with milk or egg wash
• Sprinkle the cheese on top
• Bake for 10 minutes
• Reduce the temperature to 190C and bake for 15-20 minutes or till the bread is nicely brown
• Cool in the pan for 5 minutes and demould the bread and cool for 10 minutes on a wire rack
• Serve warm
• Enjoy!

 

This is my post for the Mega Marathon under the letter ‘Z’.

 

Check out the Blogging Marathon page for the other Blogging Marathoners doing BM# 75