Swaledale
A friend emailed me this week and asked me about the Dales Dough Do and I realise I didn’t tell you how it went and what we got up to. So here goes: We arrived after a very long and slow drive in a beautiful part of the Yorkshire Dales, checked in at the Bridge Inn and made our way finally to the farm.
One of the lovely things about baking along with a bunch of great people, all the amazing Mellow Bakers out there, is that if you wait and see what they make of a recipe before you bake it, you can learn from what they do. So if there is anyone who fancies making this bread, do scoot over to the forum and join in anytime or just pop over to see what we have been baking!
This is a lovely bread, another great recipe by Jeffrey Hamelman, only one thing has caused a little discussion. The recipe calls for the cheese to be added part grated and part cubed. If you get pieces of parmesan on the outside of the loaf, or breaking through the skin they burn while the loaf is baking, apparently the taste is not good and the cheese tastes burnt and bitter.
The solution: either poke all the cubes back into the dough or simply, grate all the cheese. I did the latter; I’ve never had much success with cheese breads before, the cheese always coagulating in little reformed plasticy pools inside the bread with great caverns above. So though you can’t see the cheese in this bread, apart from the colour, you can certainly smell and taste it. Got the thumbs up from both Brian and Zeb (who loves cheese almost as much as Wallace).
I used half and half Parmesan and Pecorino because that is what I had in the house and I prefer Pecorino anyway.
The bread is a simple white sourdough with a little commercial yeast added to speed up the proving process. I reckon if you had any left over, it would make brilliant golden croutons with French onion soup, the bread has olive oil in it as well as all that lovely grated cheese, or on a Caesar salad, or fatoush, that is if you don’t just scoff the whole lot in one go!
I had a little parcel this weekend from Lynne who is an enthusiastic baking friend who posts on Dan Lepard’s forum. She is based in Switzerland where I have it on good authority it is impossible to buy a decent sausage roll. 
This is the best Wikipedia can do, but a good sausage roll is a mouthful to treasure!
We swap obscure ingredients from time to time and she eggs me on to bake things I would normally never dream of attempting. Lynne doesn’t have a blog yet, I think she is a bit busy, but I reckon it is only a matter of time…
Obscure objects of desire
Lynne knows my fondness for Boots disposable shower caps for covering my bannetons when the dough is rising and has sent me a box of three different sized food covers, so if the Three Bears do turn up and want to make bread, I’ll be ready for them. Though I am not sharing my picallilli with them. More on that in a later post.
She also popped in a box of French yoghurt enzymes to try out and, a very pretty little pack of mini loaf cases in the parcel and it’s not my birthday. Anyway, I have put one lot in the yoghurt maker this evening and it should be ready for breakfast. Such a good idea, wonder why you can’t get them here?
So here are some virtual flowers from Zeb to say thank you!
Merci beaucoup Lynne!
The following morning – the yoghurt enzymes worked beautifully! A sharp fresh tasting French yoghurt. Now to make some Mellow Bakers breads…
A lovely bowl of super fresh yoghurt and Dorset Cereal!
Zeb Bakes 