rosemary cheddar cheese bread

For tomorrow's book club, I'm assigned to bring bread... perfect opportunity to bake! I chose a KA quick bread recipe so I didn't have to spend my Saturday waiting around for something to rise.

This was an interesting recipe. You start by making two separate batters, each of which is easy to stir together. The whole wheat dough has dried rosemary in it, and the other dough has grated cheese, not to mention black and cayenne pepper, for some kick. The recipe calls for cheddar, but I only had 1 ounce (and needed 5), so I used a dryish manchego for the rest.

rosemary flour mixture

cheese flour mixture (minus the cheese)

One odd thing: in the cheese dough, the butter is melted, and therefore easy to stir together with beaten egg and milk before adding to the flour. In the rosemary dough, the butter is just softened, and you are supposed to stir it into one beaten egg combined with 10 ounces of milk. That's a whole lot of liquid, for those of you counting at home, and even though my butter was fairly soft, it by no means combined with the egg and milk. I ended up with big lumps of butter hiding in my egg/milk mixture. Since the instructions said to stir together wet and dry ingredients until just combined, I didn't want to beat the heck out of it, but I did want to make sure the butter was evenly distributed. I kind of smeared it through the dough with the back of the spoon to incorporate it.

Both doughs have baking powder, and it went to work immediately, making the doughs begin to aerate as I stirred them.

The method calls for spreading the rosemary dough in the loaf pans, spooning the cheese dough on top, and then using a knife to swirl them. I didn't think they looked very swirly (the colors are not that distinct, and the consistency made it a little hard to swirl), but you can see the swirl a little in the finished product.

I thought the bread came out very well. It reminded me of a cheesy cornbread, and I thought it might actually be complemented nicely by some scallion, perhaps in the cheese dough. I'll probably make some maple butter to serve it with (we're having blackened chicken salad, too) - that should bring out the sweetness that's missing.


ETA: I did make the maple butter, and it complemented the bread nicely! The recipe I saw called for beating 1 stick (1/2 C) softened butter with 1/4 C maple syrup, but that was way too much syrup; the butter couldn't contain it. I added another 1/4 C butter and it whipped up nicely.