K: Mint Cooking Spree, Part 2 – Orange Mint Bread

We’ve almost made it through our first bunch of mint!  I was interested to see how it turned out in bread, so tried out this orange mint bread recipe.  For this recipe, I used all of our pineapple mint.

Now, normally when I make bread, I either use the bread machine, or I use the bread hook on our standing mixer.  But for some reason, I felt like this was the recipe to really try kneading it.  And I didn’t just knead – I slapped, pulled, yanked, and otherwise abuse the bread.  (Here‘s a nice video showing the properly aggressive technique.)  It look me a long time – I spent at least 20 minutes doing this kneading thing, and the dough still didn’t entirely come together.  But, I was tired, and decided to just go with it.

After letting the dough rise once, I formed and proofed the bread, and then baked it to yield this delicious loaf:

See how squat it is?  I think that’s probably because I didn’t knead the dough enough.  Even so, it was quite delicious, especially with a little bit of butter.