Garlic Pesto Bread and Beer Sourdough

I made four mini loaves of bread yesterday, two of a plain beer sourdough bread and two of my garlic pesto bread. I've made the garlic pesto bread before but it had been awhile.

The sourdough turned out pretty well, I think next time I will add 1.5 cups of my starter instead of just the one. The sourdough taste was a little too subtle for me. But the beer is fantastic in sourdough, especially since it's in the starter as well as in the rest of the bread dough. For the sourdough all I did was substitute the water for beer (Fat Tire again) and added in one cup of my sourdough starter (anyone have a name suggestion for my starter?) I also ended up needing to add an extra cup or so of flour. I split the normal recipe that I use to make one big loaf and made two smaller ones. I baked one in a pan but the other I baked on the pizza stone, just to play with new shapes again. Before I had bread pans I baked all of my bread on the pizza stone and sometimes I miss getting to shape my bread.

For the garlic pesto bread I crushed about eight or nine cloves of garlic and mixed them into the dough, I was also very liberal with the oil. Total I probably added two tablespoons into the dough. I usually add parmesan cheese at this point too but I forgot this time. In the past I have also mixed in the pesto at this point but I wanted to try Jamie Oliver's way of making pesto so I waited till after punching it down to add in the pesto. Once I punched it down and kneaded it for a few minutes and split it in two then I laid it out one half on my floured table and pushed and pulled the dough till it was flattish then I spread the pesto over the entire surface and rolled it up like a burrito. Repeat for the other half. The pesto also had quite a bit of oil in being pesto and I rubbed more over all the outside of the loaf before letting it rise again. Once it was all done I was excited to cut into it to see my pesto swirl, and was disappointed to find no swirl, just green tinted bread (one of the very fun things about pesto bread). I think I spread my pesto too thin because I had flattened my bread out too much and created a large surface to spread the pesto on. The flavor was perfect so I don't think the solution is more pesto but rather less surface space so I can do a thicker layer of pesto. All the oil in the bread is great too and spreading it on the top made a nice flaky crust.