Well, after having spent five days in Prague, sampling their wonderful bread (there is even fresh, home-baked sourdough multi-grain bread in the convenience stores!), I came back to my daughter's house to find no fresh bread. So off we go again. First, some more of the seed bread for toast. This also makes very good toasted egg, ham and cheese sandwiches for breakfast, especially with some of the excellent cheese I got at Neal's Yard in London Borough Market - the best cheese shop in the best market in the world! :)
I made this with a poolish pre-ferment, as there is no room in the tiny fridge for cold-fermenting dough and I wanted a bit more flavour in the bread. I ended up making too much poolish so I decided to make some kind of buns to go with the Chicken Paprika I was making for dinner the next day. This was a real throw-everything-in-the-bowl kind of dough - to about 85 grams of poolish I added around 200 grams of water, and around 300 grams of mixed flours (strong white, granary and whole spelt). I say 'around' because the scales, which are solar powered, turned themselves off in the middle of weighing the flour so I eyeballed it. Then I added some smoked paprika (seemed like a good idea), a bit of granulated garlic, salt, and more of that excellent cheese from the market, grated right into the dough. After a bit of mixing, kneading, stretching & folding, and otherwise manipulating the dough, I put it into a bowl and took it into the bedroom with us to rise slowly overnight (this is the coldest room in the flat, with the window open). By morning it had about tripled and was definitely active!
Fold the dough down a bit, pat it out into a rectangle and cut into six pieces (with a pizza wheel, as my daughter doesn't have a bench scraper!), then chafe these into nice tight little balls. They proofed for about an hour and I popped them into the oven (about 200C).
I must say, they turned out rather well. They certainly smelled wonderful while baking, and they were nice and moist inside. And the weird combination of ingredients turned out nearly perfect! Not only did they go well with the Chicken Paprika, but I had half of a left-over bun for breakfast this morning, toasted and topped with cream cheese and rhubarb compote. I'll definitely be using smoked paprika and cheese together again.
- Lazy Loafer's Blog
- Log in or register to post comments
Those buns look really yum!
I still havent gotten rounf to putting cheese right into the dough, but your flavour combo sounds great.
The seed loaf looks wonderful too, I love seedy bread.
Great bake LL!
Ru
Thanks Ru! I love cheese in bread. I find if I mix grated cheese in right from the beginning it disappears into the dough, but the flavour is still there. Sometimes I freeze cheese in chunks (about 1cm or 1/2"), then chop them in the food processor. This results in everything from tiny crumbs to largish chunks which I then mix into the dough. The chunks maintain their size and shape so you get some of the little melty pockets in the bread without having the large void that you get from rolling the cheese up in the finished dough.
I bought a bread recipe book here in the UK at a thrift shop. One of the techniques the author describes is 'chafing', which sound an awful lot like when you cup your hands around the dough and rotate it on the bench to form a tight ball. She uses this to incorporate cheese and other ingredients into the dough. Interesting!