Cheesy Bread Baking

 Since I have returned home from my trip, I've been baking and cooking new recipes. The bread recipes I made were from King Arthur's website.  The recipes were quite different but similar in that they both used cheese and a tomato element. 

Pane Bianco recipe is made with Italian cheese blend (I grated hard parmagiano reggiano and pecorino), sun dried tomatoes in oil, lots of garlic and fresh basil.  I added some mushrooms and black olives.

The other recipe is Pizza Party Buns with mozzarella, pepperoni and pizza sauce.   I added some pizza dough seasoning to the dough and some pizza herbs/spice mix to the filling. These are made similar to the ones above with the ingredients rolled up.  But this recipe is cut in rolls while the other is split down the length and made into a figure 8 shape.

While both of these recipes turned out nicely and taste fine, I probably won't make them again.  I already have a cheesy bread recipe that I like to make with a mixture of cheddar and jack cheese.  Honestly, I think I prefer the parmesan cheese in biscuits and basil in Thai noodles.

Now I want a real pizza.  Saturday pizza  . . .  time to knead some dough!

POTICA - another King Arthur bread recipe with walnuts

 King Arthur recently had a contest of sorts (you could win nice prizes) if you made certain recipes and posted photos of social media (Instagram, Facebook) of your results with the hashtag "ExtraordinaryBread" and tagged King Arthur Baking.  I had already made one of the breads on the list, Cinnamon Star, a few weeks ago.  After looking at the remaining recipes on the list, I wasn't sure that I wanted to attempt one of them.  Seriously, I have a long list of recipes to try and another specialty bread recipe was not needed.   But I broke down to try the potica.    I had a lot of nuts (walnuts/pecans) stored in the fridge so this would be a good way to use up some of them.

I did this one in stages like a few breads I have been making.  Prepare the dough the night before so it can do its thing overnight in the fridge.  Started filling ingredients in the morning . . .chopping the amount of nuts called for in this recipe takes awhile!  FOUR and a HALF cups of nuts for 2 loaves.

This recipe is not as sweet as I was expecting but that is probably good.  All the nuts make it hardy and the dough is substantial . . .no light fluffy dough.  It does have a good flavor even if it isn't what I craved . . . sweet nuttiness.

King Arthur Potica

Maybe I should have measured my filling better?  Or better yet, weigh it and divide equally.  I had too much filling in one of my loaves. My results didn't look like theirs.  

Oh, well!!  

Looks and taste are not always synonymous but I don't know how theirs (KA) tasted.