Sourdough with Homemade Bacon and Cheese

As I have written about here before, I sometimes make bacon at home.

How to Make Proper Bacon at Home

This time I want to bake a sourdough loaf using it.

A little while ago I tried a bacon sourdough with rye and spelt in the dough, and it did not really work.

The rise was weak, and the inside did not cook through properly. To stop it over-fermenting in the warm weather I had built the dough with a long, cold ferment in the fridge — and I suspect fermentation simply did not progress well at that temperature. Between rye and spelt loaves being difficult to get right, and their flavour being strong enough to drown the bacon out, this time I decided to use a bread flour dough alone and fold bacon and cheese into it.

Ingredients:

• Starter60g
• Bread flour (Kitanokaori)250g
• Water (around 20°C)160cc
• Salt4g
• Homemade bacon50g
• Cheese15g

Mix the flour, salt, water and starter, let it hydrate, then work through the stretch and folds up to the end of the bulk ferment, exactly as in the basic sourdough loaf . The bacon and cheese go in at the shaping stage.

After the stretch and folds and the bulk ferment, take the dough out of the bowl and spread it gently on the work surface. Scatter finely chopped cheese and bacon evenly across it.

Cut the dough in half, stack the two halves, then stretch and fold in from all four sides and shape it into a round. Rest for about 30 minutes, stretch and fold in from all four sides once more, then place it in the basket for the final proof.

After that, bake it in the same way as the basic sourdough loaf . This time I preheated to 250°C, baked covered in the Dutch oven at 230°C for 25 minutes, then uncovered at 240°C for 10 minutes.

Eating it, the bacon feels underpowered for the trouble it took. Do the bacon breads you buy in shops actually contain a truly enormous amount of bacon?

The research continues.