Diane B wrote:
>>From: RebecB8@aol.com
>>
>>Anyone have a recipe for blue cheese walnut bread? Without the
>>whole wheat flour or very little whole wheat flour?
>This is the kind of thing I'd do by starting with a base recipe that
>you like and are comfortable making--a rather simple
>flour/water/yeast/salt kind of thing--and then add some toasted
>walnuts and some blue cheese by kneading them in gently just before
>your shaping/proofing step. I like walnuts with sourdough, so I
>usually use at least some sourdough starter in my walnut breads, but
>if you're not a sourdough fan who has some starter available, no
>need to bother.
>
>Because the nuts don't really change the crumb of the bread, you
>should as as much or as little as you prefer--the only real limiting
>factors are that too many nuts make the loaf rougher to shape and
>slice later. I prefer to lightly toast them, and to roughly break
>large walnut halves or pieces into bits about 1/2 inch long, and
>usually add a handful--maybe 1/2 cup--to a single standard loaf.
>
>For the cheese, how much to add and how and when to add it does get
>a little trickier: if you want pieces of cheese that stay 'whole'
>in the baked result, you need to add it right at the end, carefully
>to avoid blending it too much so it just becomes streaky bits and
>disappears into the loaf. That works nicely with cheddars, but I
>wouldn't think it was a good idea with blue cheese.
As a general rule of thumb, I've found that you can add up to 35-40%
of the flour weight in inert 'aggregate', which can be any
combination of dried or fresh fruits, nuts, chocolate(!), cheese or
cured meats that are cut/broken into appropriate sized pieces. For
example, Bernard Clayton's Pain Aux Noix puts 300g of walnuts into a
dough made with 800g of whole wheat flour. You can also add small
quanities (i.e., 1/8 to 1/4 tsp) of complementary herbs or spices to the dough.
If I was going to make a bread with blue cheese, I'd cube my cheese,
put the pieces in the freezer on a cookie sheet, and add the solid
pieces of cheese to the dough just before the final rise.
Dan