Jennifer Garner Makes This Recipe for the Holidays Every Year

We’re obsessed with Jennifer Garner’s home cooking, especially anything she makes on her “Pretend Cooking Show.” Whether it’s her family’s cornbread, pumpkin bread, or five-ingredient pasta, we want to know what she’s cooking. It helps that her creations are similar to what we like to cook, making us feel like she’s “just like us.”

While promoting her latest movie, “Family Switch,” she revealed on “Live with Kelly and Mark” that her kids asked for a 10-grain bread that she makes every year for the holidays. This year, that bread was a disaster.

“I doubled it because I wanted to give a loaf away, but I didn’t double all of the ingredients,” she told the show’s hosts. 

The bread is one she made on her “Pretend Cooking Show,” a loaf that needed quite a bit of attention, hence why she started the project late at night, laughing at herself in the process—also relatable. 

The 10-Grain Bread Jennifer Garner Makes for the Holidays

Jennifer uses the 10-Grain Torpedo Loaf recipe in Rose Levy Beranbaum’s “The Bread Bible.” She looks at the recipe and admits she doesn’t know why sometimes you need to make a sponge (a mixture of yeast, flour, and water that ferments for a while before making the rest of the recipe) and why other times you can just start making the bread. 

“I don’t really question these things,” she says, “I just follow what’s written.” That’s excellent advice if you’re not an experienced baker because success in baking bread requires following precise instructions. 

Jennifer makes a mixture using a 10-grain cereal mix to rest overnight, and the sponge for her bread goes in the fridge overnight, too. The video jumps to the following morning when she begins to work on the bread again. Then we watch her over a series of hours (don’t worry, the video is only 4 minutes and 23 seconds long) kneading the dough with a stand mixer, letting it rise, kneading it by hand, and letting it rise again before she finally shapes it into a torpedo loaf and bakes it.

Why is this so fun to watch? It’s inspirational. Sure, her kitchen may be larger than ours, but as long as you have a stand mixture, you can see how making homemade bread is possible. The comments on the video are so positive.

“I love watching your cooking shows and all of the different types of things you make. You are so real and transparent!” one of Garner’s followers said. 

“She’s not always sure with new stuff and that’s cool. I am always game to try something new with cooking, but unsure too. LOL She makes me feel normal,” said another. 

That’s really it. Watching Jennifer Garner bake in the kitchen with the same thoughts and feelings many home cooks and bakers have lets us know we’re all doing okay. In fact, she admits, “We’re all just doing the best that we can.”

Jennifer Garner’s Other Holiday Cooking Mistake

Jennifer also admitted to Kelly and Mark that she made too many mashed potatoes for Thanksgiving. But we have to ask, “Can you really have too many mashed potatoes when the leftovers are so useful?”

She admits that you can do a lot with leftover mashed potatoes such as making them into potato rolls. We have a few other suggestions for the actor next time she has an abundance of mashed potatoes: make shepherd’s pie, crispy mashed potato pancakes, or pierogi.

We’re confident that Jennifer can pull off any of those recipes in her kitchen.