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Use-It-Up Cheese BreadJune 29, 2008 When Trav and I went out this morning I was torn between oatmeal and cheese. By the time we got home, the decision was for cheese. I took Uprisings off the shelf, a whole-grain baked-goods cookbook that I rarely use but love to look at. It was published in 1983 and includes breads, cookies, muffins, and other stuff from about 30 cooperative bakeries from all over the U.S. We sold it at Lammas, which is almost certainly where my copy came from, and one of the contributing bakeries was the Women's Community Bakery from a couple of blocks up the next street over. I wonder how many of the contributing bakeries still exist. WCB and Lammas sure don't, but I still remember WCB's wonderful oatmeal cookies. Anyway, Uprisings sat on the counter to my right as I worked, open to a recipe for cheddar cheese bread that I mostly ignored. What went into this bread: The last active dry yeast in the jar, which was visibly less than a tablespoon so I added a packet. This may have been overkill because my dough doubled in bulk in about 45 minutes, whereupon I knocked it down and it rose again in even less time. Maybe it's the heat. Mostly whole wheat flour, but a couple cups of unbleached white and the rest of the rye flour -- about a cup and a half, not enough to make rye bread. Probably 7 or 8 cups of flour in all. Orange juice left in the carton, plus enough water to make 2 1/2 cups. Vegetable oil remaining in mostly empty bottle. Three squeezes of honey. A generous drizzle of barbecue sauce. A generous sprinkle of dried parsley. A scant teaspoon of sea salt. The remains of a brick of cheddar, plus a few gratings of parmesan because it was there* I heated the liquid stuff to just about tepid, though that wasn't exactly necessary. My smallest saucepan has been neglected a lot lately and needed something to do. Mixed it all together in my big bread bowl, starting with about four cups of flour and a wooden spoon, then adding flour, kneading (by hand) first in the bowl, then on the board -- maybe 15 minutes for all the mix-and-kneading. There followed the rapid risings, then loafing. This is one big hunk of dough. It's currently rising in my two biggest loaf pans and I probably could (maybe should?) have made three smaller loaves out of it. What the hell. These are gonna be two big-mutha loaves. I've now washed the empty rye-flour jar; rinsed the (recyclable) yeast jar and oil bottle; and rinsed the orange juice carton and chucked it in the trash. I like using things up. Travvy rooted around cleaning up bits of dough but I decided I'd vacuum anyway. Well! Travvy pays no attention to the vacuum cleaner when it's sleeping in the closet (whose door is never shut), but this roaring machine with a long moving snoot was something else again. He started barking at it, trying to keep it at bay or maybe (less likely) get it to play with him. He's very vocal, with a considerable vocabulary of howls, screeches, and woos, but this was one of the first times I've heard him flat-out bark. * Added on July 1. Thanks to Nina the Texas proofreader for tactfully pointing out that this was the first recipe for cheese bread she'd ever seen that had no cheese in it. In her honor I've added "Cheese" to the name of the bread and the title of the blog.
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