Go onto BBC good food website, they're bound to have loads of recipes. You might find some on Jamie Oliver's site too, it sounds like the kind of recipe he'd have.
I've done a blue cheese and bacon bread which was a Paul Hollywood recipe. It worked well, but you have to fiddle with the the yeast amounts. Let me see if I can find it.
It's close to a normal bread recipe (500g flour, 300ml water, 7g yeast and some salt) but with a pre mix of half the yeast, 100g flour and 100g of water for a few hours before.
This is the blue cheese and bacon bread. Any strong blue cheese is fine. It copes better being slashed in a \l/ pattern than a cross as less cheese escapes.
So have you over promised to provide bread or do you actually want to learn to do it? If the former, Wrights do a cheddar cheese and onion bread mix. It is delicious and after proving I pat the dough into a rectangle and spread on tomato paste with herbs, then roll into a fat sausage , into a 2lb loaf tin for the final rise. Couldn't be less effort and never fails ( unlike my leaden cheese bread attempts from recipes).
Oooh thank you so much @Nacreous. I am loving your notes! Why do you say 30 seconds where the recipe advises 5 mins whisking?
I've over promised because i'm a dessert aficionado! Bread is way out of my comfort zone. But I pretty much religiously cook from scratch and love to learn so I do want to do it myself. The bread mix sounds pretty great though.
30s will be because it was fine with that and I am exceedingly lazy, if I can shortcut something I do. I use a Kenwood/KitchenAid style mixer with a dough hook as well for the kneading - pre adding things like cheese.
I am mainly a desert person too, lockdown has given me time to get to grips with bread a bit more.
I guess you could rise it 3 times but I am waaay too lazy.
I don't know if it would do a good twist unless you chopped the cheese and bacon up really finely because I think they would burst out of it? But could work maybe, if you did a short fat plait? This was my last attempt - you can see it's popping out the cuts.
I think you could skip the prove after adding the bacon and the cheese and before doing the twist in that one, but I just don't know American measurements enough to know if that recipe looks off or not.
Yeah I prefer the look of the one you posted. I would have put 20g of dried fast action yeast in though, you've said 7g dried yeast. Is he talking about some fresh yeast or something? I've honestly only ever heard of fast dried!
Yes, he's referring to fresh which weighs a lot more, I imagine 20 would be about right if you did it with fresh but I've only used fresh once or twice.
You can in non COVID times usually get a lump from the big supermarket bakeries but I don't think they'd let you at the moment, so dried is probably safest.
it's half dried to fresh if you are converting any recipes.
also if you use fresh you often have to "prove" it first in some warm water/milk, sometimes with a little flour as a sponge type starter, but with the quick dried yeast you can mix it directly into the flour.
Have you tried no-knead bread? A revelation and so so easy! Here's a video to show how simple it is to make: m.youtube.com/watch?v=I0t8ZAhb8lQ
I chuck in a cup of chopped black olives to make an olive loaf (just make sure the olives are dry i.e toss between 2 sheets of kitchen roll) Delicious!
