What is Easter bread called? You will learn the answer to this question from the materials of the presented article. We will also tell you about how such baking is done at home.
general information
An invariable attribute of such a bright holiday as Easter is traditional pastries. Grandmas and Easter cakes - without them it’s quite difficult to imagine a real holiday table. Along with them, modern housewives make such pastries as Easter bread. It fits perfectly into the format of this holiday.
Artos (emphasis on the first syllable) is the consecrated Easter week bread made from a yeast base. The tradition of its preparation pretty much influenced the Easter cuisine of all Orthodox peoples.
The classic artos is prepared with the image of a cross on which only a crown of thorns is visible . This symbolizes the resurrection of Christ, his victory over death.
In the Russian community, church Easter bread is a high pastry.
At home, arthos can be prepared in many ways. Sometimes housewives give the baking an unusual shape and call it Easter bread. This product has a great taste. It can serve as an ideal decoration for a festive table. But for this you need to show a little imagination.
Excellent compositions are obtained from such bread, if you combine them with small pashechki or colored eggs. Although these are just a few of the many different options that you can choose as you wish.
Delicious Easter Bread: Cooking Recipe
Despite the external complexity, such baking is done easily and simply. To make it lush and soft, you should use only fresh and suitable products.
So, for Easter bread we need:
- wheat flour - from 450 g;
- granulated sugar - from 1.5 large spoons;
- table salt - an incomplete dessert spoon;
- dry yeast - 5 g;
- whole milk and warm water - ½ cup;
- butter - approximately 60 g;
- Sesame - use for sprinkling a cake mix.
Knead the dough
The dough for such bread should be made only with rich yeast. For its mixing use a mixture of whole milk and warm drinking water. They are combined in one bowl, and then sugar is added and mixed well. After the sweet product has dissolved, dry yeast is placed in the dishes and the ingredients are left completely at rest. After ¼ hours, they should swell well.
Having prepared the yeast mixture, add salt and very soft butter to it. The ingredients interfere with the hands and add wheat flour to them. This product should be poured until you get a uniform and elastic dough. It is covered with a rag, covered with a lid and left in a warm room for 80-90 minutes. As a result of such exposure, you should get a magnificent and soft base. To make it more porous, it is periodically beaten with hands.
The process of beautifully forming bread
Easter bread can be shaped in many ways. Someone makes it in the form of a cross with a thorny wreath, and we decided to give the baking more convenient shape for the eggs. Thus, it was decided to form bread in the form of a kind of nest.
To implement the plan, it is necessary to use a large and round heat-resistant form. It is well lubricated with oil, and then set in the middle of the bowl, after turning it upside down. It should be noted that the diameter of this dish should be half the basic shape.
After the inventory is prepared, proceed to the formation of the semi-finished product. To do this, take a small piece of dough and roll it into a round layer 0.8 centimeters thick. Then it is laid out over an inverted bowl. Next, the remaining base is divided into 7 parts and the same balls are formed from them. They are placed in the space between the sides of the heat-resistant form and a bowl.
After that, the laid out layer is not completely cut into 7 parts. The resulting petal segments open, slightly pulling the corners. Having placed them on spherical semi-finished products, they form a peculiar flower.
After the described steps, the inverted bowl is carefully cleaned. As for bread, it is greased either with sunflower oil, or cooking oil, or egg yolk. At the end of the semi-finished product is sprinkled with sesame seeds.
Heat treatment process
Easter bread is not baked in the oven for very long.
After the semi-finished product is ready, it is kept warm for 10 minutes. Then the product is placed in a preheated oven. At a temperature of 200 degrees, baking is prepared for 55 minutes. During this time, Easter bread will increase in volume, become lush and rosy. In this case, the hole in the middle of the product should either significantly decrease, or completely disappear and tighten.
We serve delicious pastries to the Easter table
After the bread is baked in the oven, it is removed and greased hot with butter. This will make it more fragrant, soft and tasty. Before serving to the festive table, colored eggs are laid out in a hole in the bread .
Outwardly, such baking very much resembles a nest.
To summarize
Despite the fact that the process of preparing Easter bread takes a lot of time (for kneading dough, keeping it warm, forming and baking), housewives bake such a product quite often, especially for Easter holidays.
If you have your own ideas on how to form rich pastries, then you can safely introduce them into the culinary process.