#breadventure

made some naan and one of them came out with a heart on it!

You can hear this bread. One second I'll show you. Please listen to my bread

This is a loaf of asiago chunk sourdough. Inside there are chunks of asiago. The dough was mixed with mashed garlic as well. The sound in the video is the cheese bubbling in the interior, echoing in the air pockets of the loaf. I'm going to eat the shit out of this for breakfast tomorrow.

This is the world's easiest sourdough loaf too, with only 6 hours total rising/proofing time!

Ingredients:

455g white bread flour

1 tsp sea salt

285g warm water

100g active, bubbly starter

120g Asiago cheese

(optional) crushed garlic to taste (I use about 2 cloves worth and it's a lot)

Asiago chunk sourdough bread

Cut asiago into smallish chunks

Combine flour and salt in one bowl

Combine starter and water in another bowl, stir until starter is dissolved.

Mix flour into the wet mixture until a dough begins to form. Knead on a well-floured surface until dough is smooth.

Mix in cheese (and garlic) until well incorporated

Dust rising bowl (solid! Not a basket!) with flour. Let dough rise 1 hour in warm spot, covered with plastic wrap

Fold over around the edges, place back in bowl seal-side down for 1 more hour

Repeat folding over around the edges, place back in bowl seal-side down for 1 more hour (3 total rising hours to here)

Shape dough into round if not, and place into proofing basket for 3 hours. Toward the end of this, preheat oven to 450F, with the cast iron pot so it's HOT when you add the dough.

Dump your dough onto your kneading board, fold over around the edges one more time, slice the top DEEPLY.

Bake 30 minutes seam-side down in covered cast iron pot at 450F. Remove lid, bake for another 30-40 minutes with lid off. (Cook time may vary on location and oven... MY OVEN takes this long. I just baked a loaf at a friend's that baked WAY differently, it was done in about 40 minutes total)

And I told my mother, shit I forgot the butter, and she goes what do you mean like inside or on top?

Inside!!! Inside!!!!!!!!! I didn't mix the butter in during prep!!! These are unbuttery biscuits!!!

And she goes

I didn't add butter to mine (I had brought her some discard to bake these biscuits with a few days ago)

I said what do you mean?

She goes, the recipe you told me didn't have butter (I told her the recipe from memory)

I FORGOT THE BUTTER TWICE

but wait there's more!!!

She goes, your dad liked them

At which point I'm forced to ask: did he tho. Did he like them, or did he tell you he liked them, the way he LIED to us for 35 years about liking pizza?

Well, she says, I don't know. he did admit tonight to not liking brussel sprouts

Which they've been eating together for years now, literally this man is incapable of telling someone he doesn't like a food which explains a lot of my childhood meals

So I'm like okay okay okay okay. Okay. I know I forgot the butter and I know these biscuits are frozen hockey pucks right now but hear me out... What if I turn the oven on to preheat it, and then put the biscuits under the oven vent to thaw, and then just mix the butter in after? Surely nothing will go wrong with this plan.

So I break out the biscuits, and I turn on the oven, and I start thawing them, and I put the butter into a bowl, and start frantically trying to mash it with a pastry masher. This goes about as well as you might expect, which is to say terribly, because the butter just sort of turns into a pile of butter instead of a stick, and I need it to be pebbles of butter.

So I start sprinkling in flour, just until the butter stops re-amalgamating. The biscuits are basically thawed by this point so I try to mash those in and that goes very very very badly, so I clean the tool and just start folding the butter in with my hands like kneading bread, desperately just trying to mash it into one coherent form. It makes a ball of dough, or good enough to pass for one, and I cut out six biscuit sized chunks.

Put them in. Bake them. My oven light doesn't work so I can't even check on them while they're baking to see if I fucked it up worse.

Finally I pull them out, and I realize I fucked up but at least it was in the right direction. The biscuits don't look like they're supposed to, but they do look like layered biscuits, and they taste fine. I put a bunch of honey on one of them and it was pretty good.

I tell all of this to my partner when he gets home and he listens to all of it in silence. When I'm done his only comment is:

"Well, I guess we know how puff pastry was invented, now."

Well. They certainly look edible. They are both very plump loaves. I kneaded a little more than previously, and I added some butter to the recipe.

After Sark requested "biscuits I can make a breakfast sandwich with," I fiddled with the sourdough biscuit recipe until I began consistently getting biscuits that held their cut shape, came apart into halves (or close to halves) easily, and were sturdy enough for a sandwich. These are the small version; I just made a first batch of bigger ones and froze them, but I'm hoping they hold form as well. I had to lower the butter amount because the original recipe called for a stick of butter in 6 biscuits and was causing them to just fry on the bottom, and butter to leak out into the pan.

I'm quite happy! They freeze well and can be baked straight from frozen. They're also delicious with a drizzle of honey, which is how I eat them!

Editing to add the recipe and instructions under a cut, per request!