Garlic knots, mmmm...

After months of wanting, I finally tried the KAF recipe for garlic knots. I first saw these knots about six months ago in an email from KAF. I immediately read their blog post about the knots and then went to the recipe page. I was discouraged, however, when the recipe called for many things I didn't have on hand; dry milk, pastry flour, potato flour, pizza dough flavoring and the rolled dough improver. Well, over the past few months I managed to buy dry milk, and the pastry and potato flours (only the potato flour came from KAF, the others I could find at the grocery store.) Finally, this past weekend, on my trip to the KAF store I bought the pizza dough flavoring and the dough improver. I know, I could have made these without the pizza dough flavoring and the improver, but I wanted to make them correctly, and frankly I forgot about them for a while.

I made the dough, and let the machine to all of the kneading. I really love my Kitchenaid mixer! Here's the dough after kneading, ready for the rise.

My rise took a little longer than the hour the website stated. Probably because my house temperature was only about 60 degrees today and I had to use the oven for other things. I did finish the rise in the oven, which was at about 82 degrees, and in total it rose for an hour and a half. Here it is post-rise.

I took the dough out, flattened it a little and rolled it out into a rectangular shape. Next, I cut the dough into 16 pieces, and rolled them out into 11 inch logs.

After, I knotted each one, then tucked the ends in to look like this.

Here they all are, ready to rise again!

While the rolls rose, I roasted a head of garlic at my husband's request. The recipe calls for raw garlic but he likes the mellower taste of roasted. I didn't mind because I didn't have to do any chopping!

It was so much easier to just squeeze the garlic out of the head into the mini food processor with the butter. After an hour, the rolls were ready for the oven. They puffed up nicely, although not as high as I would have thought, probably because I used pastry flour and not AP.

After 17 minutes, the rolls were done. Here they are straight out of the oven, pre-garlic butter.

And here they are post garlic butter and a little Italian seasoning. They were soft and delicious, though I may try them with AP flour next time to see what the difference in texture is.