3-Cheese Bread

This past weekend we also made a delicious home-made three-cheese bread adapted from a recipe from another food blogger.  We've been dappling in bread making over the past few months and decided to give it another go.

This bread recipe was different because it called for semolina flour (course ground durum wheat flour) which is also used to make pastas along with normal all-purpose flour instead of bread flour.  We had some lying around in our cupboard and decided it would be good to use up for this purpose!

I started off by combining the ingredients into the bowl of my stand mixer:

2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1 cup semolina flour
2 tsp instant yeast
1 1/4 tsp salt
2 tbsp olive oil
1 1/8 cups lukewarm water

I beat on medium speed with the flat beater for about a minute until it looked well combined and then switched to the dough hook to knead for around 5 minutes. Meanwhile, I prepared my 3 glorious cheeses (12 oz total); parmesan-like cheese (aged Sarvecchio) from Wisconsin (coarsely grated), Paranno (cubed), and Italian asiago cheese (cubed).  The recipe called for using Parmesan, asiago and Provolone cheeses but said you could use any you'd like as long as they are strong-flavored so they can shine through in the bread baking process. 

From Kitchen Assays

Cheese blocks...Mmmmm!

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Mix mix mix...

I tossed the cheese into the bowl with the kneaded dough and kneaded until combined. I set the dough into a greased bowl and covered to let rise for 2 hours.

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Pre-rise.

I lightly greased my pastry mat after the 2 hour rise and gently deflated the loaf by patting it down and folding it over a few times. I dropped the dough into its final resting place in the parchment paper sling in our cast iron dutch oven. I covered it and let it rise for another hour in the warm oven. Towards the end of the rising time I took the bread out of the oven, preheated the oven to 425 degrees, spritzed the loaf with water for the crust and split the dough with sharp knife in a cross shape along the top.

I baked the loaf in the covered dutch oven for around 40 minutes (it took longer because the dutch oven had to heat up) and removed the cover for 10 more minutes to until nice and golden brown.  I checked the internal temperature of the bread--it was around 183, but I knew that our thermometer doesn't do too well with temperatures past that so I called it done. I let the bread cool on the wire wrack for about an hour before eating.

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Temp check w/ our finicky thermometer.

Cutting into the the bread you could see nice lovely pockets of ooey-gooey melty cheeses. Mmmm! It tasted so rich with cheese (kind of like Goldfish crackers x10) and had a nice consistency. Greg and I wished we could achieve the nice yeasty flavor bakery breads have, but we figured we can't get that flavor from the store-bought packaged yeast.  Getting a better yeast flavor will be the next goal!

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