Jalapeno Cheddar Sourdough

The current all-star in my bread repertoire is easily Jalapeno Cheddar Sourdough. And why not? A big handful of cheddar cheese and two large, fresh jalapenos makes for some pretty tasty bread, let me tell you. During the bake, the essential oils from both the cheese and peppers travel widely through the dough, infusing the entire loaf, from crust to crumb, with an amazing, ambrosia-like quality of flavor. Imagine, if you will, a top-notch grilled-cheese sandwich spiked liberally with jalapeno-pepper goodness, and all of it contained in a convenient and tasty package—this is what each slice is like. In a word, magnificent. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it an 'everyday bread'. It might be too rich for that. But for a special occasion and accompanied by the right meal—a rainy Sunday afternoon, for instance, and a bowl of creamy tomato soup—this bread is just the thing.

Let’s be honest. It’s the cheese and jalapenos that make this recipe a success. Attempts at invoking subtle wheat nuance or a pleasing sourdough tang are appreciated but will ultimately go unnoticed. The fact is your cheese and peppers will overwhelm any delicate flavors that might otherwise emerge from a long, slow, cool fermentation. Which begs the question: if the flavors are masked, why use sourdough at all? Answer: a sourdough starter or even a simple preferment (poolish or biga) can do wonders for the overall texture of your bread, eliciting a creamier, chewier crumb, a more satisfying mouth feel, and just a better loaf in general. It will also help extend your bread’s shelf-life, delaying the staling process for a few extra days—not like you're going to need it. As addictive as this bread is, the smart money says it's gone the first day, devoured in full, not a morsel left behind.

Though I’m relatively new to sourdough and initially developed this recipe as a straight yeast dough, I’ve since adjusted the formula to fit my current needs. The recipe makes one good-sized loaf, about 825 grams before baking and just over 1.5 lbs when all is said and done.

320g Flour (Unbleached, unbromated)

175g Water

80g Cheddar Cheese

60g jalapeno (2 large peppers, seeded and diced)

180g sourdough starter (liquid levain, 125% H20)

6g salt

1-2g instant yeast (1/4 to ½ teaspoon)

Directions: Prepare sourdough starter and let it ripen overnight. When the starter is ready, mix with flour and water in a large bowl until the ingredients are well-combined. Let sit (autolyse) for 20-60 minutes. After autolyse, add salt and yeast. Knead for 8-10 minutes or until dough becomes smooth. Incorporate cheese and peppers. Knead 4-5 minutes longer, until cheese/peppers are well dispersed. (This might be frustrating at first, as the dough will tear apart. Keep at it though and all will come back together eventually.) Place dough in well-oiled bowl and let rise for 60-90 minutes, depending on ambient room temperature and general vigor of your yeast. You should see good dough expansion before too long. Punch down or fold. Let rise again for 60-90 minutes, depending. Punch down or fold.  Shape as desired. Proof on parchment paper for 60-90 minutes, depending. Score as desired. Bake 38-45 minutes @ 475F in a cast-iron Dutch oven* (a la Jim Lahey). Remove lid after 30 minutes, then bake for another 8-10 minutes, until the crust is browned to your liking. Finished bread will sound hollow when the bottom is thumped.

*If you don’t have a cast-iron Dutch oven, you can use a cookie sheet or loaf pan. But keep in mind you’ll have to reduce the oven temperature considerably, to 425 or even 400. Otherwise you’ll quickly scorch the bottom of your bread. Of course all baking temps and times vary according to the idiosyncrasies of your oven and the idiosyncrasies of your taste. This is to say, keep an eye on your bread!

Note: If you’re familiar with a different mixing/kneading process, then by all means, go ahead and use it. The same applies to the fermentation (rising) schedule. Leave out the autolyse if you want. Use a stand mixer if you prefer. Have a better sourdough recipe? Great. Use it. The key here is getting 3-4 ounces a cheese and 2-3 diced jalapenos into every loaf. That’s the only thing that matters. For tips on this, see below. 

Tip 1: The chemical that makes peppers, well, peppery is something called capsaicin, and for the contact-wearers among us it can make for a really bad night. Whenever handling hot peppers make sure to wash your hands before you go and do something you’ll regret, like swab a fingertip across your unwitting cornea. Keep in mind too that just as capsaicin will stay on your skin, it will remain on any unwashed cutting boards, knives, counters, kneading surfaces, etc. If you intend to make more than just jalapeno-cheddar bread, plan your schedule accordingly. I found out the hard way that it’s best to make this bread last, else your walnut raisin wheat bread will have a decidedly spicy influence. Which, come to think of it, wasn’t so bad really, just unexpected. Also, if you’re particularly sensitive to capsaicin or dicing an especially large quantity of peppers (I diced about 25 once and paid the price for it), you might want to invest in a box of disposal plastic gloves. Especially crisp, crunchy peppers have a tendency to spray when you cut them and might therefore demand protective eyewear. Overkill? Maybe. But when you get an eyeful of nature’s pepper spray, don’t say I didn’t warn you. (If you’re wondering, no, I don’t use protective eyewear. I like to live dangerously.)

Tip 2: The last time I made this recipe I used smoked cheddar cheese rather than the customary extra sharp. Highly recommended. We favor the Tilamook brand in our house (available only in the Pacific Northwest maybe?). It’s a good cheese at a fair price and they don’t use animal rennet in any of their products, if that kind of thing matters to you. I buy the cheese in blocks and shred or dice it myself into fingernail-sized chunks. Pre-shredded cheese works just fine, but some is spiked with anti-caking agents. Probably harmless. Yet unnecessary too.    

Tip 3: Though I call this a sourdough recipe, I do add a pinch of commercial yeast to the dough. The small yeast addition helps shave some time off the total process, which may or may not matter to you. Being late winter/early spring here in Oregon, we keep a relatively cool apartment, which in turn considerably slows natural fermentation. And since most, if not all the sourdough flavor will hide out behind the more charismatic flavors of jalapeno and cheese, I find that using a little yeast to speed things along doesn’t do anybody any harm. You purists out there cry foul if you like. Just know that when it comes to unadulterated sourdough (no cheese), I keep it all natural baby. I leave the commercial stuff alone.

Tip 4: I once made this bread with 25% whole wheat flour. Not bad. But I’m not convinced it produced a better final product. The whole wheat contributed a certain heartiness perhaps, but any potential health benefits were probably rendered null by the onslaught of delicious cheddar cheese. Cheese isn’t bad for you of course. I just think of this bread as a kind of guilty pleasure, an occasional treat. As such, I’m not concerned if it has a higher glycemic index than my everyday sandwich bread. What’s the old saying?  Everything in moderation, including moderation.

And finally, the Baker’s Percentage: Central to this recipe is striking the right balance between the cheddar cheese and peppers. At 20% cheese and 15% jalapeno (relative to total flour weight) I think I’ve found it.  Others may disagree and I welcome the dialogue. For the curious, my baker’s percentage is spelled-out below. For the sourdough recipe, I use 20% prefermented flour. If I were to use poolish instead, I’d probably up that percentage to 25 or 30.

100% White flour

68% Water

20% Cheddar Cheese

15%  Jalapeno

1.5% salt*

0.5% yeast

Total: 205 = 2.05%

*I back off on the salt in consideration of the salt already in the cheese.

No Knead Bread: My Take On a New Classic

Since learning the ins and outs of No-Knead bread, I’ve become for the recipe a kind of unofficial ambassador, a disciple of sorts, proclaiming it's high quality, it's simplicity and ease to anyone who will listen.  I don’t know how many people I’ve turned on to No-Knead bread (or tried to).  More than a few anyway.  As such, I’m old hat by now in my explanation of the method, describing who knows how many times the ways and means of making really wonderful bread without a lot of work.

If you’ve never heard of it, the No-Knead method was developed by New York baker Jim Lahey as a way to make extraordinary, rustic bread with a true economy of effort.  It takes time, yes, but little actual labor.  You, the baker, simply combine the ingredients in the right-sized bowl, mix until well incorporated, cover with saran wrap, then simply leave be for 12 to 18 hours, during which time you’re free to go about your daily business.  Go to work.  Go to sleep.  Reinvent the wheel.  Whatever.  Meanwhile, all sorts of delicious reactions and chain reactions and fermentations will start to happen in the dough—briefly (and unscientifically), starch becomes sugar becomes food for yeast becomes flavor for you.  CO2 is produced and trapped by the developing network of gluten, thereby giving volume and strength to your previously underwhelming bowl of goo.  After eighteen hours: shape, let rise, bake (in a preheated Dutch oven or cast iron pot).  Simple.  Efficient.  Easy.

Far be it from me to presume I could improve upon a recipe such as this.  I could not.  Rather, my goal here is to compile the resources that I’ve found in the past year or so—videos and how-to pages tracked down on Youtube and the wider net.  These are the resources from which I learned this method and, as a result, the same resources to which I have often directed my friends and family.  Watch the videos, read the directions, follow the tips (a few of my own included).  You’ll be making wonderful bread in no time.  Questions or suggestions?  Please let me know.

·        This first link (here) is to the original NY Times article in which food columnist Mark Bittman helps Lahey introduce to the world his revolutionary No-Knead bread method.  (For just the video, go here.)

·        Go here for the recipe as spelled out by the NY Times.  The actual numbers, directions, and such.  Go here for some additional thoughts from Mark Bittman about no-knead bread.

·        Go here for an excellent demonstration of the No-Knead method produced by the fine folks over at Breadtopia.com.  You’ll find breadtopia.com a fantastic resource for baking in general.  I really like what they do there.

·        Jim Lahey released his first cookbook, My Bread, not too long ago.  I own it and like it.  There are some interesting variations on the standard no-knead formula, including, of all things, a recipe for peanut butter and jelly bread.

Doubtless there are other fine resources available if only you go looking for them.  But these few links are enough to get you started.  In fact, if it’s just the basics you’re after, these links are probably all you’ll ever need.  For what it’s worth, I include below a few tips of my own, developed from my experience and humbly submitted for your approval.

Tip #1:  Pay careful attention to the videos in particular, as these will show you how to handle such a sticky dough. Above all, don't get frustrated if at first the very, very wet dough seems too hard to handle. You'll get the hang of it eventually, and so long as you somehow get the blob into the cast-iron pot, the bread will taste great!

Tip #2:  I adjusted the recipe slightly and the adjustments seem to work well for me. I use about one pound of flour and twelve ounces of water (454 grams flour, 336 grams H20), a slight increase from the given recipe. Also, I'm locked in at about 1.5 teaspoons of KOSHER salt, maybe 2 teaspoons if you like saltier bread. I don’t think you’d want to go much higher than that.  Keep in mind that Kosher salt has hallow crystals and therefore takes up more space than regular table salt (less salt overall to the average teaspoon). This is to say, if you use regular table salt, you'll want to back off considerably on the total amount, to a single teaspoon or so. Anyway, just experiment. If you weigh out your ingredients with a scale—by far the best option, in my opinion—disregard everything written about salt and teaspoons. Just use 8-12 grams salt/loaf, depending on taste, regardless if it's kosher, sea, or table salt.

Tip #3:  The trickiest part about this bread is transferring the dough from the cotton towel in which it rises to the cast-iron pot or dutch oven in which it bakes. You may want to forget the towel completely and use parchment paper as a substitute.  It’s what I do.  Since parchment paper can withstand high oven temps it can go directly into the pot with your dough, making the whole process that much easier. (For a discussion on parchment and higher oven temps, go here.)  The process for substituting parchment is as follows:  Once your dough has fermented for 12-18 hours, and after you form the dough into a ball, simply plop it down on a square of parchment and then cover with a big mixing bowl to keep away the drafts and dust. When the dough has finished rising, drop the whole shebang, parchment and all, into your preheated pot.  Simple as can be.

Tip #4:  If you opt to go the parchment route, you can make your bread more aesthetically pleasing by sprinkling flour over top the fully-risen dough.  Again, it’s what I do.  Sprinkle liberally, then, just before dropping the dough into the pot, score the loaf in a pattern of your choosing.  This is to say, use a razor blade, a really sharp knife, or even a serrated tomato knife to make slashes on the dough’s surface about a quarter or half-an-inch deep.  As the bread bakes, the slashes will open and spread and crust-up to pleasing effect.  Until you get the feel for it, scoring or slashing can seem sort of difficult, especially with dough as wet as this.  But rest assured, poor scoring has no effect whatsoever on flavor.  Anyway, if it tastes good, who cares how weird it looks.

Baked Feta w/olive oil & no-knead Bread

Harold McGee: On Kneading

My good friend Trevor sent me this article written by food-science expert Harold McGee. Turns out the standard 10-15 minute kneading stage, once thought essential to well-made bread, might not be so important after all. Go figure.

I wonder if any old school bakers out there will bristle at the news.  I don't think so, not if the popularity of Jim Lahey's No-Knead bread method is any indication. Better bread with less work--what's not to like? Besides, McGee states pretty clearly that much depends on the kind of bread you intend to bake. High hydration rustic white loaves require less muscle, it's true.  But tight-crumbed sandwich loaves and whole grain bread apparently still benefit from at least a few minutes kneading, leaving tradition and precedent somewhat in tact. Good news for those of us who (a) enjoy kneading from time to time; and (b) have at some point pontificated 'expertly' on the need to knead thoroughly. Number this baker happily among those in the former category and, unfortunately, lump him also in with the latter.

By the way, the poor aspiring baker forced to suffer my pontification? You guessed it. Trevor. The same good friend who sent me the article in question. Coincidence? I think not.

A (Personal) History of Bread & Baking, pt. 1

The first time I baked bread was in early September, 2008. Gena and I had just moved into a house in the Rosewood neighborhood of Columbia, South Carolina. Cola-town, South Cackalacky. The official home of boiled peanuts (awesome) and Palmetto Bugs (not so awesome). This was our first place together and already we were less than enamored of our landlord. Not a bad guy, just more enthusiastic in his landlording than we were used to, stopping by often and without warning. It was our first place together and we knew already that, despite our landlord, we had made the right decision. Gena planted tomatoes and zucchini beside the garage. I watched the backyard pecan tree with anticipation, waiting for the nuts to fall, not knowing yet how well they would complement golden raisins or cranberries in the rustic French farm loaves I later taught myself to bake.

The first time I baked bread I was just beginning my last year in graduate school (English), working on my thesis, taking two classes, and teaching another. I spent most of my day at the computer, pecking out page upon page of lesson plans, essay analyses, essay responses, emails to students, professors, classmates, family, friends, etc, etc, etc. Only occasionally did the tap, tap, tapping of the keyboard taper off into oblivion, and if that awful keyboard-silence marked the end of something, it was, alas, not likely the end of my daily workload, but more likely the end of my rope. I hear sometimes that graduate school is not like real life, that real life exists only outside the boundaries of the University. Real life or not, in graduate school the work is difficult and unending and often leaves your brain the consistency of raw bread dough. And now that it’s over, I find I sometimes miss it badly.

The first time I baked bread I needed distance from the essay I was writing. Pacing the house as per usual, from room to room, I was looking for a way to divert my attention: a worn-out baseball glove and tennis ball; a guitar played poorly; recurrent visits to the ever-tempting bounty of the refrigerator—almost anything would do, even the glossy pictures in an old cookbook. Two weeks earlier, a friend had given Gena a book about bread, an outdated relic from the 1970’s, something I’d totally ignored until then. In it though were wonderful full-color photographs of obscure (to me) breads and pastries, pretzels, bagels, and flatbreads. Captivated by those delicious-looking photos, I decided to try a recipe, the first and supposedly easiest in the book: basic Italian white bread. Since that day things haven’t been the same.

The first time I baked bread I used too much flour. I didn’t know how to measure correctly and, when the recipe called for three cups, I packed those cups so tight it nearly took an act of congress to get the flour loose again. Not surprising then that the dough was far too stiff to knead easily and ultimately made for an overly-dense, too-dry bread, much like an aromatic paving stone. But man alive! did that stone taste wonderful. Gena likened it to the rustic, crusty loaves she ate while studying years ago in Malta. I noticed similarities, albeit distant, to the perfect bread of my memory, the bread my grandparents made—and still make, five loaves at a time—for us grandkids on holidays and get-togethers. The golden crust. The creamy white crumb. And the smell. The slightly nutty, slightly sweet aroma of, well, fresh baked bread. What better way to say it?

Humans and cereal grain (barley, wheat, rice, etc) and even yeast must have co-evolved, adapted over millennia to work well with each other, a team on which each member does its part to improve upon the whole—grain to provide the sustenance, yeast to make it more palatable and to preserve it, humans to organize and endlessly replicate the dance. A triangle so beautiful even Pythagoras would blush. For my money, beer is evidence enough of this symbiosis. But if you’ve ever smelled a kitchen during bake-day, you’ll find something especially elemental seeping phantom-like through your neural pathways, a scent to call up the shadowy specter of early civilization, even things beyond. If Ben Franklin was right and beer is proof that God loves us, then fresh-baked bread is proof that heaven exists—what else could smell so good?

And this is why, on some level, my first homemade loaf of bread left me feeling troubled. When I pulled it from the oven, I was absolutely dumbfounded to find the recipe had worked, that I had made bread—bread!—in my own kitchen, with no special equipment, and with only four, readily available ingredients: flour, water, yeast, salt. No factory necessary. No machinery. No chemicals. Until then I didn’t think it any more possible to make bread at home than I thought it possible to build my own car, or refine my own oil, or compose my own symphony or…well, you get the idea. The problem though is that bread is so easy. Flour, water, yeast, salt. Mix, knead, rise, bake. That’s it. That’s all there is to it. There are nuances, sure, and ways to complicate the process. But there is no mystery. Why is it then I believed that producing bread, the very staff of life, was beyond my ability, that like a new pair of socks, bread could only come from (a) my grandmother or (b) the supermarket. This disconnect bothers me still. And not just a little. It makes me wonder what else I can do. It makes me wonder why the disconnect at all.

The first time I baked bread was an experience nothing short of revelatory, and I was proud of my inaugural loaf to an almost absurd degree, misshapen and dry though it was. A more recent attempt produced not one but three loaves, and not your basic white bread either, but rich-tasting five-grain sourdough with flax and sunflower seeds. These were much better tasting than that first historic paving stone, and better looking too—I’ve come pretty far in just a year and a half. Anyway, I’m hooked now, thoroughly addicted to the pursuit (and defense) of good bread. It sounds crazy I’m sure, but to me, when I really think about it, there are few things more important. I mean, it’s the staff of life, for crying out loud, the way we fuel ourselves. What could be more vital?