How to Make Olive Garden Bread Sticks

Hi. This is Stephanie Manley with Copykat.com. Today, I'm going to show you how to make Olive Garden breadsticks from scratch. They're going to be a little bit more dense than what you find in the restaurant, but at least now you can make these at home and try them with one of my great Olive Garden soups. That's available here on YouTube. So, we're going to start out with yeast because, well, to make bread rise you need yeast. We're going need a little bit of sugar. We're going to need some salt. I'm using vegetable oil. I'm using all-purpose flour. If you have bread flour, you can use it, but all-purpose flour works great. Then, we are going to brush these with a nice seasoning of butter, garlic powder, and parmesan cheese, with a little bit of oregano. That's our special ingredient for just a little kick. So, why don't I show you how to go ahead and get started on these breadsticks? So, the first thing that we need to do for our breadsticks is we need to go ahead and add in some warm water into our mixer. Now, I've just warmed this water up on the stove. You don't want it too hot. You want it to where you can actually... Where it's comfortable to stick your finger in it. You don't want it boiling or anything like that, because it will kill the yeast. So, one and a half cups of water. Now, in the description bar, you can find the exact ingredients and measurements. So, go ahead and use those. Click on there for the exact ingredients. OK. We're going to add in our yeast, a tablespoon of yeast. We're going to go ahead and add in our sugar. We're going to let that rest for a second while we go ahead and measure out our flour. Alright. So, when we measure our flour, I want to give you kind of a tip or trick. It's really important if you're not going to weigh out your flour, like some recipes recommend, you need to scoop your flour, and then put it into the cup. Then, you need to go ahead and level it off to get the most accurate measure. This makes sure that your flour is not overly packed in there, and it makes sure that you get just the right amount. So, in goes your flour. We're going to put about four cups of flour in here. That's one. [music]. Alright. So, we have our flour in here. Then, I'm going to go ahead and add about a good teaspoon and a half worth of salt. Then, I'm going to add a couple tablespoons of oil for the bread. Now, I'm just using regular old vegetable oil. You could substitute this for melted butter if you'd like, but vegetable oil works just great. Now, we're going to put this on and let the mixer do its trick. OK. Part of the mixing... You're going to go ahead and scrape down your bowl. Now, you can do this by hand if you like, or you can even do it in a food processor. Those work equally as well. So, just scrape down your bowl and let it mix to where it forms a nice, soft ball of dough. So, I put in four cups of flour, and my dough is still a little soft. Let me show you how it looks. This is not going to ball up and form a nice dough, so I'm going to add a little bit more flour to it. Now, often, the humidity in your house will often play in baking. So, if it's really dry, if it's really humid, you may need to vary your amounts of flour. This looks pretty wet, so I'm going to go ahead and add in a half cup of flour. We should be good now. [noise]. OK. So now, we've sprayed our bowl with a little bit of nonstick spray. We're going to put our dough in here, and we're going to let it rest until it doubles in size. It should take about 45 minutes or so. I'm going to spray it with a little bit of nonstick spray on the top, so it doesn't form a crust or anything. Then, we're going to go ahead and let it rise. OK. So, here is another bread dough mix that I went ahead and made earlier. So, I'm going to go ahead and put a little bit of flour on my board, and I'm going to take some of this dough. Now, we're going to shape it into the sticks. I'm going to make my hands... Pat a little bit of flour on my hands, and go ahead and roll this out. I like the French rolling pin because it doesn't have any moving parts, and it's nice, and it's simple. OK. So, we have kind of made a nice round here. Now, we're going to simply cut our breadsticks. [music]. Now, I'm going to take these and roll these just a little bit, and lay them out on my pan. We're going to let these rise. [music]. Alright. So now, we're going to make our melted butter garlic sauce that we're going to brush upon these breadsticks. My secret ingredient here is just a little bit of oregano. I would say that maybe like 1/8 of a teaspoon. Rub it between your fingers to kind of get the oils activated in the breadsticks. That's really going to add something nice to the breadsticks. I know a lot of people don't add that into the breadsticks, and I think they're just missing something. You're going to add about a half a teaspoon of garlic power. Then, we're going to add about a good tablespoon of parmesan cheese. Then, we're going to mix these together, and then we're going to brush them on our breadsticks. Then, we're going to bake them in the oven. So, once you've finished brushing butter onto the breadsticks, go ahead and bake them in the oven until they're nice and golden brown. OK. So, our breadsticks have come out of the oven. I am just going to brush them with just a little bit more of the garlic butter. We're going to serve these up. If you've enjoyed this video, please give me a big thumbs up and drop me a comment down below of what recipe you'd like to see next.