Panera Breadsticks

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Soft, buttery breadsticks are simple bread with one decision that people get half right: butter them before baking and again the moment they come out.

The two coats do different jobs and neither substitutes for the other.

Before baking, the butter soaks into the surface of the raw dough and carries salt and garlic into the crust as it bakes. It also helps the top brown.

After baking, the butter sits on a hot crust, melts, and stays there as a glossy layer. This is what you taste first and what makes them look right.

Only butter before and they are seasoned but dull. Only after and they taste of butter on top of plain bread.

Salt the second coat, not the first

Salt on the pre-bake butter dissolves into the dough and disappears.

Salt on the post-bake butter stays as visible crystals on the surface, and you meet it directly. Flaky salt, not fine.

Enriched dough, and why it stays soft

Milk, butter and a little sugar in the dough all interfere with gluten forming long tight strands, so the crumb is shorter and more tender.

Fat also coats the starch and slows staling, which is why an enriched bread is still soft the next day and a plain lean bread is not.

Do not over-flour when shaping

The dough should be slightly tacky. The instinct is to add flour until it stops sticking to your hands, and that flour goes into the dough and makes the breadsticks dry.

Oil your hands and the work surface instead. It stops the sticking without changing the recipe.

What you need

Dough

• 500 g strong white bread flour
• 300 ml warm milk
• 2 tsp instant yeast
• 2 tbsp granulated sugar
• 60 g butter, softened
• 1.5 tsp fine salt

Butter coats

• 60 g butter, melted, for before baking
• 60 g butter, melted, for after
• 1 tsp garlic powder
• 1 tsp flaky sea salt
• 1 tbsp chopped parsley

Method

1. 1. Whisk the yeast and sugar into the warm milk. Leave 5 minutes until foaming.
2. 2. Mix the flour and salt, add the milk and the softened butter, and bring together.
3. 3. Knead 8–10 minutes until smooth and elastic.
4. 4. Cover and rise until doubled, 1 hour.
5. 5. Knock back, divide into 12, and roll each into a 20 cm rope with oiled hands.
6. 6. Onto a lined tray, spaced apart. Cover and rise 30 minutes.
7. 7. Oven to 200°C. **Brush with the first lot of melted butter mixed with the garlic powder.**
8. 8. Bake 13–15 minutes, until golden.
9. 9. Straight out of the oven, brush with the second lot of butter, then flaky salt and parsley.

Brush the second coat immediately

Within about thirty seconds of leaving the oven, while the crust is hottest. The butter melts into the surface rather than sitting as a greasy film, and the salt sticks to it.

Wait two minutes and it pools instead.

Rolling them evenly

Roll from the centre outwards with both hands moving apart. Rolling back and forth over the whole length gives you a rope that is thick in the middle and thin at the ends, and the thin ends overbake.

Storing

Two days in a paper bag at room temperature. Plastic makes the crust soggy.

Reheat at 180°C for 4 minutes and brush with a little more butter — they come back well.

Three months frozen. Thaw and reheat as above.