Herb Cheese Bread

Submitted by gil on

Another recipe from the lovely Dutch Oven Madness. I saw she was interviewed for a podcast by another blogger, I'll have to check that out later.

I followed the recipe pretty much to the letter. However, the dough was still very liquid after adding at least another cup of flour. I took a stab at kneading it anyway, wound up kneading it with the new technique I picked up off the internet. Sorry, I can't find the link at the moment. After 20 minutes of kneading (no joke!) the result was somewhat doughy and I set that to rise. Once it was roughly doubled in size (an hour or two) I tried to cut up the dough to roll it in preparation for the braiding. A combination of a lack of flour on the surface and intoxication made me give up on braiding so I recombined the dough and set it in the dutch oven to rise. I gave it another hour or more and baked it at the prescribed 350. The oven was preheated but the dutch oven was not. In order to get the browned top crust that you see in the picture I let it go for something like 20 minutes over the prescribed 20 minutes. This was not entirely a good idea: the bottom was not burned but charred a bit. I was also checking it every 5 minutes after the first 20 minutes so you could probably set it for 40 minutes and only check it at the end of that.

The end result was technically competent. The crumb was fluffy and moist. Bubbles were present but not super huge. The crumb was composed of thin, fluffy layers which was kind of strange. I didn't spread out the dough but it flattened itself out like that during the cooking. Reading up online it appears that if you fold the boule it creates surface tension that holds the bread in shape. I wasn't a fan of the taste at first: it seemed the seasoning overpowered everything and just didn't go well with the cheese. I wound up eating the entire thing the next day in the afternoon so it grew on me. My father was a fan, if he asks for it again I would redo it.

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