Cream Cheese Pull-Apart Garlic Bread | Anything With Alvin

Hello there. Welcome back to another episode of Anything with Alvin, where today we're gonna be taking on Korean-style cream cheese garlic bread. And I'm honestly fascinated by this dish because it seems to be quite different than your typical American-style garlic bread, from both the cream cheese filling to the egg-style custard soak. I think that this will be a very fun recipe. I wanna thank Squarespace for sponsoring this episode and supporting the BCU from the very beginning. I'm excited to announce my new website, B-A-B-I dot S-H, or as I like to call it, Babby Dutch. The ultimate destination for all things BCU. There's all the recipes for my videos, exclusive new recipes. You can search by genre or ingredient. You can even toggle between US and metric and scale the serving size. We heard your feedback about everything you wanted from the site, so that's what we did. You can get 10% off your first Squarespace order by visiting squarespace.com slash babish. So the first thing first, we do have to make the dough. Sometimes the shops use day-old bread or what seems to be pre-packaged rolls, but I thought it would be a good idea to make the rolls ourselves. This is a pretty standard recipe. 585 grams of all-purpose flour, one teaspoon of instant yeast, 50 grams of granulated sugar, and two teaspoons of kosher salt get combined in the bowl of a stand mixer. And then we're gonna add one and a half cups of warm water. And let this go on medium for about 15 minutes or so because we're aiming for a pretty good gluten development. So look for that windowpane pattern when you stretch the dough between your fingers. All right, our dough is now looking pretty good. It's got some good stretch to it, so we're gonna take it out of the stand mixer and dump this in a sprayed oiled container to let proof for about one hour or so until it is increased in size. Now let's make the cream cheese mixture. This is pretty simple. It's about 16 ounces of cream cheese and four tablespoons of powdered sugar that we're just gonna whip slightly in the same stand mixer until it is combined and homogenous. This gets transferred into a piping bag to be saved for later. Our dough has now proofed and is increased in size, so we're gonna take it out of its container and onto a work surface with some bench flour. Then we're gonna cut this dough into roughly six equal balls and shape them, hopefully trying to get them to the same size. Clearly, I'm not very good at dividing this into equal sizes. We now have some very large rolls and some that are not as large. So let's just say I did this because it was interesting to see how the different sizes would affect the final texture in the end, if it makes sense to make this with a larger roll or a smaller one. Once these six completely uneven balls of dough have now been rolled into tight little balls, we're gonna let them proof with a cover for just a little bit more, about 30 to 45 minutes, just until they're ready to be baked. Now that they've grown, whoop, just a little bit, we're gonna egg wash the top. We're gonna bake these in a 400 degree Fahrenheit oven for about 20 minutes until they're nice and golden brown and everybody is big, round, and shiny. All right, onto my favorite part of this recipe, that garlic custard. So in Korea, I feel like it's pretty common to use minced garlic in a lot of applications due to its convenience and the fact that you can use a lot at a time without having to chop a bunch of garlic. And I'm sure it would be pretty tiring for all those stores that sell this garlic bread to be chopping so much fresh garlic each and every day. But I do wanna try this with fresh garlic as well. So I'm gonna cut up 12 entire cloves of garlic. And my idea is to split the custard into two. One that uses minced garlic comes from the jar and one that uses fresh garlic that has been hand chopped right beforehand. So to make this garlic custard, we're gonna combine one cup of melted butter, two cups of half and half, four teaspoons of sugar, and four eggs total. Mixing that together until everything is as homogenous as possible. Now we're gonna separate these into even batches and add in our freshly minced garlic to one batch and the minced garlic from the jar to the other batch. Then we're gonna add in a heavy dose of dried parsley to both, giving it both a green color and hopefully a slight green flavor. Our bread is now cooled a little bit, which means we can cut into it. We're gonna take a roll and cut this into a eight-sided star shape, going down the middle, halfway through. We're gonna go again, turn it 90 degrees, halfway through, and then we're gonna repeat that until we have eight beautiful petals. And just like in the videos, we're gonna take our cream cheese and pipe that between those petals, making sure to fill all eight. And that way it opens up the bread as well for some good dunking later. But before we can do that beautiful dip into our garlic custard, there are eggs in here, which means that it does need to be slightly cooked over a bain-marie in order to emulsify and thicken. Otherwise the butter and the half and half is just gonna sit there floating and it's not the correct texture. So we're gonna take each of our garlic custard batches and put that over a pot of simmering water and just slowly whisk that for about 10 to 15 minutes until it has come to a nice, thick, syrupy consistency. Now for the really fun part. We're gonna make sure to keep an eye on which one is fresh and which one is minced garlic from the jar and dunk our entire roll of split and cream cheese-filled garlic bread into this soak, making sure to catch a lot of that garlic on the way back up, and making sure that every single nook and cranny is soaked through, which is the really fun part. Three of these get the same treatment on one side of the tray and the other three will get the same treatment on the other side of the tray. To be honest, it's gonna be hard to tell the difference on which one is the fresh garlic and which one is not, but hopefully we can do our best. And if we can't, all that answers the question. Now for the final touch, each of these breads get a nice little piping of cream cheese to finish off right in the center and then a good sprinkling of either Parmesan or Pecorino cheese. It seems to me that they're just using some sort of powdered cheese on top. That's pretty common to what you would do with normal garlic bread anyway, so it's gonna get a nice dusting. Go into an oven at about 375 degrees for about 15 to 20 minutes, just until they're golden brown and crispy on top. Now, while those are baking, we do have a lot of leftover garlic custard that wasn't soaked in the bread, so we're gonna make some fun shapes out of this. I had an idea to take this baguette, cut it in half, and to turn one half into this hassle bag garlic bread situation and make sure to pipe cream cheese in between each one of those slices, then the other into the more of a crosshatched diamond powder garlic bread version where there's no cream cheese at all. That way we can compare how the cream cheese affects it and how the cream cheese is either necessary or just a fun addition. Either way, both of these get a nice good dunk inside and again, get some dusting of cheese onto a tray and into the oven to bake as well. But hey, it looks like there's still some leftover garlic custard and I don't wanna throw that away. So we found some leftover bread that's lying around in the studio. Kendall said that they didn't need it anymore from a shoot so we can use it. Definitely not suspicious, but in the spirit of not wasting things and making fun food out of leftovers, we're gonna cut those little cubes up and just toss them into our garlic soaked mixture, making sure that they're all nice and coated and putting them onto a tray, spreading them out, giving them a cheese shower and going right into the oven as well. Needless to say, we have a lot of garlic bread in the studio today. All right, our first batch is now coming out of the oven, nice, beautifully star shaped and perfectly golden brown on top. Now to be honest, I technically should let this cool to room temperature because in the videos, these are definitely baked fresh every day, but as a street market, sometimes they're not really sold at the hot temperature and they're probably room temperature or slightly cooler depending on the weather. But honestly, I can't really resist the appeal of just piping hot garlic bread so we're gonna go in for a taste. Now the flavor is really, really nice. So this is a very different than your typical American garlic bread. American garlic bread is usually crusty, really chewy, and has a really strong, pungent garlic buttery herb flavor, which is really delicious. This is more reminiscent of pastries you might find at Asian bakeries, a little more mellow, softer, fluffier bread with a slightly sweet flavor coming both from the cream cheese and the garlic bread custard. The texture is also very soft on the inside, even though the crust is nice and crispy, because the egg and the cream kind of soak through, it's more of like a souffle kind of bread. It's definitely got a lighter, more fluffier texture, which I think is more palatable to people walking around in the street food market. And the cream cheese is a nice addition to the garlic. The sugar doesn't really bother me at all. It just kind of helps mellow things out and makes you want to eat more. And it's kind of fun to peel one petal off at a time until you end up with the base and you just eat that too. All right, how about our baguette garlic breads that we've made? Now eating one of the Hasselback ones was definitely a little too hot. I think this would taste a lot better room temperature when things aren't scorching, but the way that you can just peel off a slice is a pretty good way to serve this kind of thing at a party. And I really like the one that doesn't have cream cheese as well. This one is a little bit more similar to your typical American style garlic bread, because it doesn't have that softer, mellower flavor, but still quite delicious in its very own right. And those cubes that are baked off at the very end are also nice little garlic bread croutons, let's just say. The entire place smells like delicious garlic bread. And between the few of us that were in the studio that day, we made sure to take claim on which one we wanted the most, pack this up, take it home, and enjoy a garlic filled day. Probably not gonna go out and talk a bunch to people right in front of their face because it wouldn't smell too good. But hey, at least your stomachs are happy. Thanks again to Squarespace for sponsoring today's episode. From websites to online stores, to domains, to analytics, Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for you to build your online presence. All of my websites over the years have been with Squarespace, and I'm excited to share the new one, BABI.SH. 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