How do I cheese bread?

May 17, 2019 12:10 PM

How can I best add cheese to a bread recipe that does not originally contain it?

I have been baking this bread consistently for the past several months. I may never make a different bread recipe again, as this one is everything I want bread to be: soft but substantial enough for sandwiches, puffy, flavorful, and still pretty good even after four or five days.

Sometimes, however, I find myself craving a bread with cheese incorporated into it. I am a recipe follower and not a person who understands a lot about the science of bread. So I have two questions for people who have that understanding:

1) Can I add cheese - probably shredded cheddar - to this recipe without ruining it?

2) When and how should I go about doing that?

Thank you!

posted by darchildre to Food & Drink (6 answers total)

Once you roll out the boules, I would sprinkle with cheese, do the folding, add another sprinkle (for science) before you roll them up.

Must be delicious.
posted by humboldt32 at 1:01 PM on May 17, 2019 [2 favorites]

I would try sprinkling the dough with cheese, then rolling it up as shown in the photos.

Thank you for sharing the recipe! I'm.just getting into bread making and that looks so tasty!
posted by easy, lucky, free at 1:11 PM on May 17, 2019

I am a recipe follower and not a person who understands a lot about the science of bread

That is way less important than you think it is. Trial and error, art and preference, all this triumphs over pre-engineering. Just try it. There will eventually be a version of this cheesed bread that you will absolutely love, I have great confidence! On the flip side, whatever you make on your first try will be absolutely fine. It may not be the magical puffy perfect sandwich bread that is the uncheesed recipe at its best, but it will at its worst taste fantastic and have sub-optimal texture. Just make some! If you wanted you could try two different techniques in one, mix the cheese into half the dough, and roll it as a layer of cheese in the other half, see which one you prefer and what goes weird. And if you do it this weekend and tell us how it went, we can try to troubleshoot!
posted by aimedwander at 1:56 PM on May 17, 2019 [2 favorites]

Another option for adding cheese: Melt it into the roux at the beginning. If that loaf ends up weird and greasy, try again but eliminate the butter, because there's a substantial amount of fat in the cheese. (if you did a thing where you just added shreds to roomtemp dough and they only melt when it bakes, that's not a big deal, keep the butter; but if you melt the shreds into the dough the fat's incorporated and you can try dialing back the butter if the first batch doesn't seem right). Or if that comes out too mild, consider adding parmesan instead of or in addition to the cheddar, to get a stronger cheesy flavor with less volume of change. On that topic, you can experiment with what cheese you're adding; I'd expect mild cheddar might affect texture faster than it does flavor, and you'd be better off sharp, but sharp sometimes separates in a greasy way when it melts. Have fun! eat your mistakes!
posted by aimedwander at 2:05 PM on May 17, 2019 [1 favorite]

My dad used to make a really great cheese bread, and I think that his method would translate easily to your recipe. When you roll the dough out, add the cheese you want evenly over it and then roll it up.

My dad would do this with a mix of things, including ricotta and some egg to help everything stick together. He'd add other cheeses and herbs for flavor, but the stickiness of the ricotta and egg made a lot of difference.
posted by bile and syntax at 2:46 PM on May 17, 2019 [2 favorites]

Professional artisan baker here. You can add shredded cheese to your dry ingredients and proceed as normal with little change in the final product other than yummy charred bits of cheese in the crust and a slightly rougher textured skin than usual. Be generous! You can get nearly the usual product with tons of flavor by adding around 20% of the flour weight in finely shredded/crumbled cheese and even more if you don't mind losing a little fluffiness.
posted by nenequesadilla at 8:29 PM on May 17, 2019 [2 favorites]