Mediterranean buns with olive and blue cheese

Bread making is getting addictive, the result beats store-bought bread any day. You can make it sweet or salty or both! Also I am getting better at it. So today, just before I go off to the grocery store - I wanted to make a "generic dough", it will rise while I'm going around running errands, so that it can be worked into a beautiful delicious bread later for dinner. Today, I am going to show you my Mediterranean Buns with olive and blue cheese. Off to the grocery store I go, adding 2 things on my list: olive tapenade and blue cheese.

Blue cheese is.. special. Yea I mean it is delicious but it's so strong, with uh.. bacteria. Apparently this cheese is discovered by accident when bacteria sneaked in.. and we loved it. Well, I suggest don't think about it too much, it's not to be eaten with large portions, but with the right amount and ingredients - it lifts many dishes up to the next level.

What you need:

- 2 cup of flour

- 1 tsp of instant dry yeast

- 3/4 cup of warm water (38-40 C)

- 1 tsp of salt

- 1 tbsp of sugar

- 3 tbsp of plain yogurt

- 1/2 tsp of each: rosemary, thyme, oregano

- 1 tsp of olive oil

- 4 tbsp of olive tapenade

- 2-3 tbsp of blue cheese (crumble it)

Recipe:

- Mix flour, herbs, yeast, water, yogurt, olive oil, salt, sugar in a large bowl. The dough should be easy to roll as we are going for a soft and fluffy texture. If you want to do the dry and wet ingredients separate and mix together after - you can but it's not necessary at all.

- Cover the dough with a lid or saran wrap, leave in a warm spot for an hour - an hour half. This will allow the dough to rise to double the size and generate all the air pockets. This is when I went to the grocery store btw. YAAS to multi-tasking. 

- After the hour or so past by, take the dough out fold it around and roll it out to a flat rectangle piece with your rolling pin. 

- Pad some olive oil on the rectangle. Spread the olive tapenade to a thin layer on the dough rectangle, you can add more or less. I find a few tablespoon was enough. Throw your blue cheese crumble on top of olive-y rectangle, evenly-ish.

- Roll up the rectangle from one edge to get a long snake looking roll of dough with all the olive and cheese rolled up in the middle. 

- Slit the long snake dough in half so the olive and cheese innards are exposed a bit. Cut the length of dough into 1/3 so you get like 6 pieces of messy, cheesy. olivey, half expose dough half snakes (Omg I'm hoping this makes sense.)

- Twist each of the 6 pieces onto itself into a bun shape, keep the olive/cheese bit on top and exposed.

- 400F, bake for 20 min. 

- Drizzle some honey on top, brush it evenly or just drizzle on top - it's all good.

- Serve while warm. 

First I served this for dinner with fish and salad - goes really so well together because the fish was not entirely flavorful so this was an awesome compliment to the meal. Allow me to shamelessly insert my awesome (and super easy) baked whole fish sea-bass recipe: https://www.eatwithjia.com/2020/04/grilledbaked-whole-fish.html

Next morning for breakfast, I grilled (yes you heard right, buns straight on grills on the BBQ) these babies for 6 min on 400F and they were even better! The grilling process made the buns crispy on the outside and still fluffy in side. drizzle a bit more honey - believe me, you do not want to miss this.

This Mediterranean deliciousness was inspired by parts of several yummy recipes: Focaccia, naan, and Nadiya's time to eat on Netflix. Best things to combine cultures is through the food, it's a pure mishmash of awesome. Why not? I enjoyed this thoroughly and think you will too!