Cheesy Buns- Warming my Heart

Yum!

Being a lover of all things food related, I’m constantly on foodpress.com searching for new recipes.  I came across one last week that literally made me clap my hands together with delight.  What I am about to post is now a third generation recipe.  The post I found was from Sally.  She got the original recipe from Maja from Serbia, on another baking site.  Thank you ladies, for sharing this recipe and bringing a pathetic amount of joy to my life in the form of cheesy bread.  And so we begin my love affair with baking bread and rolling it around delicious treats.

I’ve never worked with yeast before, and bread for that matter.  Growing up my family had a bread machine, but I’m sure anything I did with that was supervised.  This time, it was all me.

I perused the recipe and started to dream up what I wanted to do with it.  Maja and Sally used cottage cheese to fill their buns, but that just wouldn’t cut it for me.  I love cheese and I needed this opportunity to create something so incredible that I wouldn’t think about the calories as I devoured these little angels of joy.

The recipe yields 40 little buns, so I decided on two different kinds of cheese.  Herbed gouda, because let’s face it… if I can add gouda to something I absolutely will.  And I found some herbed brie that was on sale.  Booyah.  And we can’t just stop there people.  I was planning on making these for breakfast so naturally bacon would have to be added as well.

I made the dough on Saturday night before I went out, to ensure it had enough time to rise.  I massaged the shit out of it late Sunday morning and split it up into five little balls as Maja explains.  I rolled them out on our dining room table.  Having dealt with crust thousands of times, I was ready for the stubborn child to emerge and give me all kinds of problems, but I was pleasantly surprised.  The dough rolled out very easily.  I found that rolling it on a plain surface, without flour that is, really got the job done.  It took no time at all.

The next step was to cut it into 8 triangles and form my buns!  The original recipe suggests using looser cheeses.  Cottage Cheese, Goat Cheese, Feta, etc.  I thought about this as I cut my blocks up into smaller pieces.  Instead of being afraid I realized that this just seemed right.  The world was aligning itself in my cheese to bread decisions.

My favorite picture.

I took the opportunity to line my bacon on a baking tray and pop it in the oven for 10- 15 min on 350.  The buns would only cook for 20 minutes so I wanted to be sure our bacon would be fully cooked.  After the swine was ready, I cut it up into smaller pieces to fit nicely into my bundles of joy.  I’m not going to lie here.  I trimmed the fat.  Don’t judge me!!  It just looked so disgusting and I didn’t want to take a bite of delicious cheesy bread and start chewing on gnarly bacon fat.  I’m just not that kind of girl.  And it worked out because after all the trimming…er.. cutting off most of what was packaged, I had just the right amount of bacon for my buns!

The rolling began.  I went back and forth between brie and gouda, happily wrapping my blocks of cheese in small strips of bacon.  Upon completion, I brushed on an egg yolk/ milk mixture that really made me feel fancy.  These buns were officially legitimate.

Little Angels!

I popped them in the oven and ended up cooking them for about 25 minutes on 350, rotating which was on the bottom rack.

Look at that hook.

I lost some cheese.  At first it was a frightful sight, looking at a tray of charming buns with cheese graphically oozing out of their sides.  I let them cool and when I returned my reaction immediately changed to, “ooh, cheese chips.”  The rolls turned out wonderful.  The gouda really stole the show, but I realized days later that a reheated brie was not to be reckoned with.  It was just the right ratio of both, and the bread itself was a fluffy accompaniment.  I had a real winner on my hands.

For next time, I decided I needed to roll these babies a little tighter, to help with the cheese ooze.  I also needed to roll the ends down, as many of the points popped up.  You’ll notice this in the pictures.  It didn’t affect the taste at all, but when I bake something I love I want it to look perfect.  And lastly, I’ve decided next time I’ll have to try goat gouda (the mother load) with either ham or prosciutto.  Who am I kidding?  Of course it’s going to be prosciutto.

Below is the recipe I used to make the bread.  This was a very daunting task, as the original recipe was all metric units.  This is something I strive not to fuck with because baking is a very exact science.  There’s no room for faulty conversions.  (See what I did there?  I’m clever sometimes!)  So I kind of created my own version of the original, including changing out some ingredients, and I was very happy with the overall outcome.

4 c flour

2.5 tsp active dry yeast

1 tsp sugar

1 c milk

1/3 c vegetable oil

1 egg

To activate the yeast, I put the above amount in a glass and added a splash of milk and mixed.  I let it sit for a few minutes until it blew up and then added to all the other ingredients.  I mixed as much as I could with a wooden spoon and then took to kneading with my hands until the dough looked pretty compact.  It was very tough and there were still some crumbs underneath, which didn’t matter in the long run.  I covered it and left it in the fridge overnight.