Goat Cheese Bread

This month the theme of Bread Baking Day #40 is bread with curd.

We live in Thailand for nearly five years and we love it. The only food we miss is artisan bread (taken care of) and cheese (still working on). Dutch people are lucky with their great variety of cheeses. And what they don’t have, they can buy nearby. A year ago we started to make our own cheese. It is difficult! I can tell about the hygiene, the weather, the cooling conditions, the press, the salt, the ripening, and…. But, I don't.

When I read the announcement of Zorra for this months theme I thought; ‘I know a little bit about making curd. I can make soft goat cheese and it’s deliciously easy. But, how will it taste in bread?’ Today we will know. 


Zorra writes: 'Curd is a dairy product You don't need to make curd yourself, but you are invited to do so, if you like. Otherwise just buy it. You can use curd, cottage cheese, quark and paneer and the bread can be sweet or savory'.

For this month's bread I found a great recipe made by Tim, the breadbakingbassplayer. It’s for Yogurt bread and has sourdough in it. Two things we love in bread, but not for this recipe. Zorra asked for yeasted bread; that’s been a while. And even though Yogurt is a dairy product, it’s not obtained by curdling milk with rennet or an edible acidic substance such as lemon juice or vinegar. But, soft goat cheese is! The first thing to do, was changing the recipe from sourdough to yeast and from yogurt to goat cheese. This is the result, what a nice color:

On the day I was baking this bread I read a posting by Susan of WildYeast. As everybody knows; Susan shares her great knowledge on baking bread and this helps to improve my bread. This time the posting was about crust. I normally follow the instructions of other bakers as good as I can. And when my crust was pale I placed the loaf in the electric oven for some color. But, this didn't gave the loaf a big and crunchy crust. Susan gives many tips on how to improve your crust, but I had no idea about this one: 'It's hard to over bake bread'. So, today I pre heated the oven much longer, steamed for 10 minutes and kept my bread in the oven until it had color. The smell is the kitchen is great; thank you Susan!  

We ate the bread that evening. The crust is crunchy, the crumb is soft and has a  mild goat cheese taste and flavor. We like it!
This is what I used: 
450 gr all purpose flour 
50   gr whole wheat bran 
300 gr  whey (from making goat cheese and in stead of water)

10   gr sea salt

15   gr honey

100 gr homemade goat cheese (from goat cheese milk and lemon)

5    gr dry instant yeast

 

This is what I did to make the goat cheese: 

Put 600 ml of goat cheese milk in a sauce pan and heat to 62˚C. Turn the heat off. Squeeze the juice of 1 lemon in the milk. Stir gently and you see the milk and the lemon juice divide. Pour the curd into a cheese cloth and hang it above a bowl. The whey can drip into the bowl. After 1,5 hours the dripping stopped. The goat cheese is ready for use.

This is what I did: 

Place the wet ingredients in a bowl. Add the dry (except the salt) ingredients on top. Mix till all combined well. Cover with a plastic bag and let rest. After a 30 minutes rest add the salt and mix till you have a medium dough consistency.

Transfer the dough to a lightly oiled bowl, cover and let rest.

Fold the dough 3 times in the bowl a plastic scraper. Cover and let rest for 30 minutes.

Fold and turn the dough, cover and let rest for 30 minutes.

Pre-shape into a boule, place seam side down in well floured, linen lined bannetons. Cover and let proof for 1 hour. Tim placed the banneton in a plastic bag and placed it in the refrigerator overnight. 

Preheat oven with convection to 260˚C for at least half an hour. You need steam; I placed my cake form with hot stones.  

Turn the boule out onto parchment paper, place into oven directly on to stone.  Bake for 10 minutes 260˚C with steam, then turn down to 230˚C. Take the steam pan out, rotate the loaf and bake for another 30-35 minutes, or until the loaf is brown. Cool completely on wire rack before cutting and eating… 

I found the recipe made by breadbakingbassplayer Tim 

I send this loaf to Zorra of Kocktopf, this months host and founder of Bread Baking Day  

I send this loaf to Yeastspotting, a great place where Susan shows bread from all over the world to share