I needed a side dish for the Caprese Stuffed Chicken Breast recipe I made earlier this week. My first idea was to find a vegetable, but then I came across this garlic bread recipe. I suddenly had to add a vegetable to my check AND garlic bread dinner.
Buttery, thick Italian spiced Grilled Parmesan Garlic Bread is the perfect summer side to almost any meal and so incredibly easy and budget friendly!
The Ingredients
There aren’t many ingredients for this recipe (yay!) and none of them were expensive. In fact, I had most of them on hand. The only ingredients I needed to buy were the bread (fresh French bread from my local grocery store’s bakery section was a must) and parsley. Although the recipe calls for freshly grated Parmesan, I cheated a little and used leftover pre-shredded cheese I already had in the refrigerator. My husband prefers it anyway, and I am cooking for him too.
It’s not specified in the recipe, but I used unsalted butter. The recipe calls for salt, so unsalted butter worked perfectly. I’m sure you could use salted butter if you omit the 1/4 teaspoon of salt from the recipe. Unless you like very salty food. It’s up to you 🙂
The Process
Freshly toasted garlic bread is very quick and easy to make. The total time spent on this recipe was 22 minutes. That broke down as follows:
- 15 minutes prep (includes pre-heating the grill)
- 7 minutes to cook (it took an extra minute to melt the cheese)
Things went pretty smoothly except I ran out of the butter/herb mixture after dipping about half my bread slices, despite using a light touch. I had to make a second batch to finish the rest of the slices, and that added a few minutes to the prep time. Next time I will try only dipping one side into the butter mixture.
The rest of the process went very smoothly. I brought the bread, garlic, parsley, and Parmesan out to the grill and cooked al fresco. Running in and out of the house between steps would have been impossible since each step just takes a few minutes.
I did find that rubbing the garlic onto the bread requires a very light touch. The bread is quite soft, and I smooshed the first couple of pieces a bit. I really wanted to make sure I got garlic on them, and I was a little too enthusiastic (I really, really love garlic). So the lesson here is to be gentle with the garlic LOL.
