Pesto Monkey Bread

Dough:

1. Warm the milk (do not boil!), Crumble the yeast into it and dissolve while stirring. Mix the sifted flour, sugar, and salt in a large bowl. Then knead in the eggs and yeast milk using the dough hook of the hand mixer. When everything has joined together, knead in the softened butter in flakes. The dough is quite soft and must turn smoothly away from the bowl wall when kneading. Then close the bowl and place in the illuminated oven for 1 hour.

Pesto:

1. While the dough is resting for the pesto, only pluck the basil and parsley leaves from the very thick stalks, leaving the thinner stalks on. Peel the garlic, chop it roughly. Put the leaves and garlic in a blender with pine nuts and oil and puree them finely. Then add the grated Parmesan and mix everything again briefly. Finally, season with salt and pepper.

Completion of bread:

1. Regarding the production, it should be said that it can either be baked on the sheet or in any shape you like. However, if you want more crust, you can use the tray and determine the shape (round, oblong, S-shape, etc.) yourself. If you want a cake-like wreath that is taller than flat, wide and only crispy on top, you need a cake shape with an inner hole and a diameter of 26 cm. A box shape should be approx. 30 x 13 cm.
2. The dough should have more than doubled in size after resting. Then it is still very soft and sticky. For further processing, knead the dough gently in the flour on a very well floured work surface until it no longer sticks.
3. Preheat the oven to 200 ° O / bottom heat, line the tray with baking paper or foil and have the pesto ready in a bowl. Then cut off small portions of approx. 20 g from the dough, roll them with floured hands, roll them in the pesto and place on the baking sheet. But they don’t all have to be exactly the same size. So manufacture ball by ball and arrange it on the sheet as you wish. I opted for 2, sometimes 3 layers and NOT rolled all the balls in the pesto. But that’s up to you, because the amount of pesto is actually intended for all balls. In my case, I smeared the egg yolk on the balls without pesto before baking.
4. If you now use a mold, you can loosely layer the balls into it. In both cases, the blank has to rest for another 40 minutes before it can be put into the oven. The baking time for the flatter structure on the tray is 30-35 minutes and you may have to cover the bread with aluminum foil for the last 10 minutes. It should turn out nice and brown and the pesto dark, but it shouldn’t burn. Baked in a mold (that is, more massive and compact), the bread needs a baking time of approx. 50 minutes. Here, too, it should be covered after approx. 35 – 40 minutes of baking time. The wooden stick sample is also recommended. The dough must no longer adhere when it is pulled out.
5. This pesto-plucked bread tastes good with hearty soups, with a garlic-sour cream dip …… but also without anything