Folded Cheese Sourdough Bread (with just a touch of garlic)

First of all, let me tell you, fellow cheese freaks – you need to make this bread.

You need to make it because it turns out gorgeous, because it takes so very little effort, and because it tastes so incredibly cheesy, it borders on being hard to describe.  I’ll try though!  Have you ever bought that pretty loaf of “cheese bread” in the bakery, and then were disappointed when only the cheese-sprinkled crust tasted of cheese at all?  I know I have.  And this, in all its oozy cheesiness, this tastes like – and thus is! – the remedy for all your cheese bread disappointments.  This bread is moist, and has a beautifully open crumb with some shiny set-melted-cheese slicks in it, and is smells rich and wonderful and tastes as cheesy as I could have wished it to.

The sourdough base with a bit of wholemeal rye mixed in adds both a good sour edge and a wholesome earthiness to the flavor, and the chewy, glossy-pored texture is satisfying in the sense of you not actually needing to eat half the loaf to sate the cheese craving (hey, that’s a great way to deal with desire to snack on cheesy snacks otherwise!).  And to make it more of all the good things I love, I tossed in just a touch of garlic, too!  Now, do you feel the need to make it?  I sincerely do hope so!

The making, and specifically the putting-together method of this bread was inspired by something I had seen on the net somewhere, and, to my utter dismay and frustration, have failed to bookmark – which subsequently ended up with me being unable to find where I had seen the recipe and photos that prompted the making of this.  I looked and looked and found tons of different cheese bread recipes, but not the one I had wanted.  So, the credit for the idea goes to you, unknown blogger – and if someone recognizes the idea from someplace else, please do let me know so that I can credit the blogger for his or her idea.

The dough for this bread is a sourdough with about 1/4 wholemeal rye to 3/4 white bread (high-protein) flour, prepared by the no-knead method (see detailed instructions here).  Which is, in short – I mix the ingredients, cover the bowl with plastic wrap, leave overnight at room temperature (fairly warm, Swedish room temperature – I suspect it is 19-22C in my kitchen at night), then shred my cheese and proceed to the very easy prep and proof.  And then I transfer the whole thing on a piece of baking parchment into a preheated Dutch Oven and bake it.  But, first things first!

Ingredients:  (makes one loaf)

• ~50g live sourdough starter (I use 100% hydration) fed with some rye and some wheat flour in the past 48 hours.
• 120g wholemeal rye flour
• 360g white bread flour
• 2 teaspoons salt
• 2 teaspoons garlic granules or powder (this is entirely optional but I recommend it.  If you like garlic, I heartily recommend it.  If you worry about it, no it does not give it a heavy garlic scent at all – more like a gentle hint of it in the finished product.  If you still worry, replace this with a favorite seasoning of your choice.)
• 350ml cold tap water

• ~2.5dl (1 cup) coarsely shredded cheese of your choice (I used a mix of aged cheeses but this is really up to what floats your cheese boat).

Method:

• Mix all dry ingredients other than cheese and whisk to combine.  Mix water and sourdough starter in another bowl and whisk to combine.
• Mix the liquid into the flour mixture with a wooden spoon until all flour is more or less incorporated – the dough will be shaggy and somewhat sticky, and grey in color (rye flour tends to do that, don’t worry, it’ll bake up beautiful!).
• Cover the bowl with plastic wrap (clingfilm) and leave overnight in your kitchen.

• The next day, flour a board thoroughly and scrape the soft dough out on it.  Flour your hands as well and gently stretch it out using your hands into a rough rectangle.  The dough should be very relaxed and not resist at this point, so it should be fairly easy.

• Take your shredded cheese and sprinkle it all over the rectangle, as evenly as you want to bother with.  Just, you know, avoid dumping it all in a sticky clump onto the middle of the dough, and it’ll be fine.

• Roll the rectangle along the short edge to make a short stubby roll.  (Yes, I’ve rotated it in this photo after rolling!)  Cut the roll into three pieces and place them on a piece of baking parchment cut sides down to make a lumpy loaf.

• Flour a piece of cling film and cover the loaf with it (floured-side down) and then with a kitchen towel, and leave to proof for 1-1.5 hours (this may take longer if your kitchen is not very warm and depending on how lively your starter is), until it is somewhat puffed up.  Because of its shape, the loaf won’t quite double in volume, but the rise will be visible.
• While the bread is proofing, preheat your oven to 220C with the Dutch oven inside.
• Once bread is ready to bake, remove Dutch oven from the oven, open lid, (be careful, it will be bloody searing hot!), and carefully place the bread into the Dutch oven holding it by the baking parchment edges.  If you drop it a few centimeters, it will do it no harm.
• Cover Dutch oven, and bake for 20 min at 220C covered.  After the 20 minutes, remove lid and lower temperature to 190C and bake uncovered for another 20-25 minutes until the top is properly browned.
• Remove (carefully!) from Dutch oven – I usually stand it on a sturdy foot stool covered with a terry towel I do not mind singing for this – and cool on the rack for 2 hours or until cooled completely before cutting.
• Once cooled and cut, wrap the cut end in aluminium foil.  The bread will keep for a few days without drying out – if it lasts long enough to be around.  I cannot say with any certainty that it would last for longer than 3 days because after that it was just gone.

Rejoyce in your cheese satisfaction!  This is one of the best ever breads to have to vegetable soup in my opinion – the earthy flavor, the substantial texture and the glorious flavor of cheese works great without any need to butter the slices – but you do as you wish, for that is between you and your cheese addiction.  Because *cough* it’s not like I have sliced thick slices of it just to have alongside a cup of tea or anything…

In hindsight, I may try to make an even fatter roll and only slice it in half to see how that works to make a shorter and thicker loaf, but that is more a matter of curiosity than a necessary instruction, and it may well not turn out any better than this in the end.  And the slices were still a good size, especially if slicing slightly on the diagonal as I did.

Submitted to Yeastspotting.

Cheese and Cardamom Cocktail Puffs

Of all the nibbles I have offered to my guests over the years, this one, I think, has been the most asked-for recipe.  These, my dear readers, are the cheesiest, lightest, most gloriously flavorsome tiny cocktail savories that I have ever met!  If you love cheese, please, I urge you to make these – they are like all the flavor and richness of cheese but in a light as air and gently spiced puff shape that you pop into your mouth, and… reach for another, washing it down with whatever you happen to have in your drink hand!

Alongside all their culinary virtues, they are also one of the most ridiculously easy things to make, so the reward to effort ratio nears infinity here – my favorite sort!  The only excuse for not posting it here sooner has been the fact that these are usually gone before I have a chance to grab the camera and snap a few photos.

Well, today was different – I made them to take along to an informal dinner this evening, and so they were not ravenously devoured by the hungry horde before I could sneak the camera into the kitchen.  So I did, and now I am posting about them, and then I will pack them into a box, put on a pretty top and head out into the winter night in anticipation of excellent food and a good time, and the rest is history.  Or well, at least now I can just point all the “how do you make those cheese things…?” questions here, and you, too, can make your very own savory and spiced just as you like and oh-so-cheesy and fluffy and light cocktail snacks.

Disclaimer – when I say they are light, I mean it as in not a heavy mouthful of chewy stuff people – this is no diet food of any kind, nor will I make any health claims for it, other than the fact that they are likely still better for you than all their sugary cousins.  So there.

What do you need to make your own?

(This will make about 1.5 baking sheets worth of cookies, depending on how thin you roll the dough and how small you cut them)

• 3-3.5dl plain flour
• 3-3.5dl grated cheeses of your choice – I tend to use a mix of about 2/3 random aged cheese such as strong cheddar or brännvinsost (a Swedish cheese made with spiced vodka of a local variety), and about 1/3 of some hard cheese such as Parmesan, Grana Padano and the like.
• 1/3 – 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 2/3 tsp salt
• 1/5 tsp cardamom seeds (not pods), pounded in a mortar, or a large pinch of ground cardamom.  (Note:  It can probably easily stand up to 1/2 a teaspoon of those really, if you like cardamom!)  Or you can use a little of your favorite savory spice – fennel, rosemary, lavender, whatever floats your cheese!
• 1 egg yolk
• 125g unsalted butter (omit salt above if using salted), cut into small pieces

What you do:

• Preheat oven to 200C (fan) or 210C (regular).  Line 2 baking sheets with baking parchment.
• Mix flour, salt, cardamom and baking powder.  Add butter and cut in till it is the size of small peas.
• Mix in cheese and mix till fully incorporated.  Add egg yolk and mix with spatula for a while, then stick your hands in and start rubbing the crumbly stuff together till it comes together into a dough.
• Wrap dough ball in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 10-15 min while you clear the counters from the mixing clutter.
• Flour your work surface and rolling pin thoroughly, roll the dough out to desired thickness (I go for about 5mm, approximately), and use a small cookie cutter to cut these out.  Generally 2.5-5cm is a good size for these.  The ones pictured were made on the small side.  Space cookies about 1cm apart on the baking sheet.
• Place sheets in oven and bake for 5-10 minutes (depending on oven, thickness and size of puffs, use common sense people!) until puffed up and just barely beginning to turn golden.  You do not want them to brown much at all.
• Cool on a rack, and place into a baking parchment lined airtight container (a tin box works really well).  Puffs will keep for 3-5 days (if they survive to keep that long!)  I have not tried to freeze them so I have no idea how well that would work, but I would hate for these to get soggy.

In my very biased view – and I am a cheese addict! – these work equally well with a glass of bubbly or a glass of a good red wine, or even a coffee if that is what you fancy.  Me, I will have it all, thank you very much!

Party Leftovers – Streamlining The Fridge

It’s that time of year again!

The fridge is groaning from the load of everything you’ve shoved in there like an advanced level of tetris – including all the tiny bits of leftovers from the party the night before that you fear are going to slowly go bad before you figure out what to do with them.  Your kitchen looks like a disaster zone after same party, and you are groaning because you’ve been running around in circles preparing food, then entertaining people, and then trying to clean up after the aforementioned (and possibly giving up after one dishwasher-load).

Yep.  We’ve all been there.

And the last thing you want to do after you have done all of the above, is to cook something complicated from scratch.  Or, at least that’s the last thing I want to do.  What I want to do, is, frankly, is lie down on the sofa, eat something fresh and something comforting, and hope that Disney was right, and if I just hum some stuff off-tune, my forks and dirty cutting boards will march into the dishwasher and/or sink and scrub themselves.

Leaving drug-induced sentient kitchenware hallucinations aside, I have found that party leftovers can and do make the easiest of comfort foods, provided that you have something to use as a vehicle.  What I mean is – what is usually left over after a party?  Well, I am not entirely sure about you,  actually, but after my parties, the refrigerator usually contains a selection which looks sort of like this:  a quarter-pack of dried ham and/or sliced cured salami of some sort, a large assortment of tiny bits of expensive cheese, half a loaf of random bread, and some fruit which was supposed to have been put on a fruit platter, and didn’t make it.

So what do you do with 2 tablespoons of one cheese and 3 slices of the other, and a few half-dried-out bits of Prosciutto di Parma?  You take that hunk of tough bread, slice it as thin as it’ll go, butter the buggers, and slap the cheeses and meat onto it in some semblance of order.  You know, so they don’t clash too much.

This here isn’t a recipe, because there just isn’t one.  You preheat the oven to about 225°C,  search the fridge, hope there is any butter (in a pinch, a drizzle of olive oil would do if the bread is too tough to go without), and put these together.  Then, you season them according to your taste.  In my case, the goat’s cheese bits got a drip of honey, and the slices of random cheese on parma ham got black pepper.  I didn’t even have any runny honey, so I improvised with a spoon warmed in a cup of tea, set honey and my finger to push it off the spoon.  Whatever works.

Then, you put the whole thing into a preheated oven and give it a few minutes – and I really mean “few”, not “many”.  As soon as the cheese is melted and bubbly, or in case of goat’s cheese, browned at edges and puffing up, out it comes.

Slice up that fruit which went forgotten when canapes were getting munched and booze was flowing, set it on the side of a platter, stick a napkin on the platter, and transfer these onto the napkin.  I used a pair of tongs, because sandwiches, when they come out of the oven, will be hot (personal experience here!).

Drag to your sofa/laptop setup, add a humongous mug of coffee, and look outside at the pitch-dark sky of 3:30 in the afternoon.  Feel good about the streamlined contents of your fridge.  Keep hoping the dishes will scrub themselves.  Or, if that fails, after being refreshed from having had something to eat and a bucket of coffee, attack them with a sponge.

Works every time!

Luscious Crab And Artichoke Bake

It’s November in Stockholm.

The leaves are carpeting the ground, the temperatures have plummeted to near-zero overnight, and at 3pm, the sun is on its way to the horizon.  It’s dark.  When it’s dark and gloomy, what do you do?  Well, I don’t know what you do, but I make comfort food.  And since I do want to fit into my evening and cocktail dresses, I try to make LCHF comfort food, because that’s the way I don’t ruin my relationship with the mirror!

I hold strongly to the belief that anything worth eating as a starter, is also totally worth eating as a main course in a larger quantity.  Now, some starters take better to this than others – making 5781907810 tiny canapes just to have them all for dinner is possibly one of the less-practical variations, though I have been known to buy and bake M&S mini-quiches, or, you know, their vol-au-vents and eat all 12 of them for dinner… *cough*

Spicy Crab and Artichoke Bake

Things like soup, sticky spareribs, grilled giant prawns, and generally things you can just easily make for 4 and then split between two people, however, work wonderfully well.  Such as, for example, this luxurious, delicate, hot and cheesy crab and artichoke bake.  Because while I could make it in smaller mini-casseroles, why not just make a whole batch and split it between two large ovenproof bowls?  No reason whatsoever!

I’ve written about artichoke dip and its murky origins before, and this need not be repeated here, as this is just a richer and more decadent cousin of the aforementioned dip.  Thanks to the addition of cream cheese and bearnaise sauce, it also spreads better if you are into that.  Me… I tend to go at it with a fork.  Less carbs that way, and more hot, steaming, crab-sweet and cheesy goodness!

Best of all, just like its cousin, it can be made literally in a few minutes of effort (plus baking time, but you don’t need to shovel coal or stock the wood stove for it these days), and from storecupboard (well, and fridge) staples.  At least, the things to make it are usually found in my home.

Clockwise from the left: semi-soft and hard cheese, can of artichoke hearts, jar of chili flakes, bucket of 10% fat yoghurt, bearnaise sauce, cream cheese, tabasco, can of crab, garlic. Not shown: box of frozen herbes de provence.

Oh, you want a list?  Ok then:

• 1 can of crabmeat (I tend to keep it on hand, and being canned it does keep.  I use local supermarket brand ICA, but I remember Tesco, or Princes working jusst fine too.  Or if you’ve got some fresh crab, by all means, have at it!)
• 1 can of artichoke hearts in water (again, local supermarket brand, pick the nicest ones you can find, generally)
• 2-3 heaping tablespoons (really heaping) of 10% fat yogurt
• 2 tablespoons (normal) of bearnaise sauce (any variety works, and hollandaise won’t go amiss.  Some people even plunk mayo in, but I don’t keep that around the house.)
• 1/2 box (~75g) full-fat cream cheese (like Philadelphia, or any decent brand)
• 1 large pinch chili flakes
• 2-3 large cloves of garlic
• ~1 cup (2.5dl) shredded (fluffy, not packed!) cheese.  I use a mix of semi-soft cheese and hard cheese – think fontina, gruyere, provolone, graddost+parmesan, romano, grana padano or gran moravia.
• 1dl more of finely shredded (not packed!) hard cheese (to top)
• 1 tablespoon fresh or frozen herbs (go nuts – parsley, oregano, herbes de provence mix, terragon – whatever you like.  It’s optional but it is nice)
• 1/2 to 1 teaspoon Tabasco or other hot sauce (optional and dependent on your heat tolerance)
• A sprinkling of ground chipotle (totally optional and not for the faint of heart where it comes to capsaicin)
• 1 teaspoon of white wine or lemon juice works well but is also entirely optional.  I skip it if I use the vinegar-based hot sauce.

What to do:

• Preheat oven to 200°C.
• Open cans of artichokes and crab, and carefully drain both.  I squeeze individual artichoke hearts upside-down over the sink to get rid of the liquid inside.  Set aside.
• Put garlic, chili and frozen/fresh herbs (if using) into a food processor (I use a tiny mini-chopper) and blitz till garlic is finely minced.  Add half (if using mini-chopper) or all artichokes and mix till coarsely chopped (no need to puree them!).  If using mini chopper, empty into a mixing bowl and blitz the remaining artichokes too.
• Put the artichoke-garlic mass in a bowl, add the shredded cheeses and the crab, and mix through.
• Add yogurt, cream cheese bearnaise, and the optional hot sauce, lemon juice or wine (if using), and mix again until more or less uniform.
• Fill the ovenproof bowls or an oval baking dish with the thick mass and level the top.
• Sprinkle with chipotle pepper to taste, and top with the finely shredded hard cheese.
• Bake in preheated oven for 30-40 minutes until the mass is hot through, cheese is melted and bubbling, and the top is properly browned.

I serve this with a green salad to start, and then just a handful of crispbread to have something to spread the gooey mass on.  Or, for myself, a fork.

Of Ruined Fondue And Unnecessary Disappointment

The following post is half a rant and half the instructions for those wishing to avoid the aforementioned disappointment.  And I will try to go gently on the rant bit, as I try to avoid those without a good cause.  Sadly, this is a good cause.

I make no secret of the fact that if I have to pick my one favorite celebrity chef for cookbook-buying (I don’t normally watch TV so I have no idea of how entertaining or useful their shows are, so I go by the reading and cooking quality of recipes myself), it’d be Nigella Lawson.  (If I had to pick two, the other would be Nigel Slater, and if I could have three, Emeril Lagasse deserves an honorable mention.  Just so you know.)  Now, as she herself says, her qualifications regarding food are not those of a chef, but rather of an eater – and, incidentally, also a cook.  Which is also fine by me.  I tend to find her recipes easy, good to eat, and generally have nothing but positive things to say of her.

Which makes last night’s occurrence all the more sad and disappointing.  The story is simple – I had some decent smooth-melting-type cheeses in the fridge which needed to be used, leftovers of a box of white wine, and a freshly-baked loaf of sourdough bread and I thought I’d make a lazy dinner of fondue.  Now, I’d not made fondue before, but being a decently good cook, I did not feel it should be too difficult if I got a good recipe and followed the instructions.  And because I like and trust Nigella’s cookbooks, I did not turn to my usual internet-scouring for tips, but opened up my Nigella Express book and found the fondue recipe I’d seen it on previous read-throughs.

Note, that I am not saying the book is bad in general – in fact, I’ve cooked out of it, and done so successfully, and the food was gorgeous as always.  But not this recipe.  I have followed it to the letter.  Unfortunately, the instructions were, simply put, wrong, and my cheese clumped despite my best efforts.  Again, I had at first thought the fault was mine, but a bit of research on the net (something I should have and would have done before ruining the cheese had I not trusted said cookbook so well) showed that there are several steps and an ingredient omitted in the recipe as it is written which actually have to do with cheese clumping prevention.

So, here are the steps you’d need to take in addition to the aforementioned recipe to make it workable:

1. Add 1-2 teaspoons of lemon juice to the white wine.  Most traditional fondue recipes have this, and one or two helpfully explain that it helps break the cheese down.  Why it is omitted from generally lemon-in-fridge-assuming Nigella book, I do not know.
2. Preheat the wine.  Nigella’s recipe says to add wine and cheese to the pot and heat it.  No, no and no!  Preheat wine with the lemon juice, specifically until hot but not quite boiling to help melt the cheese as you later add it.
3. Add cheese to hot wine in little batches and stir in figure-8 to avoid clumping.  Add cheese as previous batch more or less melts.
4. Use low heat once the wine is hot and while you add the cheese.  The recipe simply does not mention the heat setting and sadly, it really should have.
5. There is also the additional bit where the cheese should ideally be at room temperature and not straight from the fridge, but I suspect if the previous 4 items are followed, this step could theoretically be skipped as cheese does not have a very high heat capacity (unlike meat).

So there you have it.  A recipe that would have been fantastic had it been actually complete.  That is to say, it still tasted good, it just was clumped and not pretty enough that I’d have served it to any visitors.  T and I ate it, and were happy, but it was a bit labor-intensive with the long cheese-gone-stringy bits in what should have been smoothly melted sauce.

Better luck next time, and I will make it with the addition of lemon juice and the above instructions and feel confident that it will work just fine.  And taste fine again, which is why I will be reworking it.

I am by no means disappointed in the food writer herself, nor in the book as a whole, but I think – shame on you, Nigella, you really could have easily done better.  And, in my opinion, should have.

Of Fried Cheese (Halloumi Salad)

There are few things quite like cheese browned in the oven, the bubbly, deliciously savoury golden crust.

- with avocado and fresh lemon juice

What if I told you that there is a way to get that golden deliciousness all over the cheese and then have it on your plate – without the oven, melted mess and sloppiness?  Would you believe me?  I hope so, because it’d be sad to miss out on something as amazing as fried – or grilled! – halloumi cheese.

Halloumi originates from Cyprus, and is made of goat and/or sheep’s milk, often also mixed with cows’ milk, and the uniquely wonderful thing about it is its ‘squeaky’ texture when it’s raw – and the fact that it stays in one coherent soft and cheesy piece when fried or grilled, while browning all around in the best melted-cheese fashion.

Sounds a little exotic, but thanks to its ever-expanding popularity, most Western European (and probably American as well) supermarkets I’ve looked in have at least one variety, and often even a selection of it, so acquiring your grilling cheese is easy.  Here in Sweden a 150g block (about enough for 2 people’s lunch salads) runs 20-30 Swedish krona (2-3€)  on average, but I imagine prices will vary between countries.

I have tried both, grilled and fried versions of this, and I must admit that it is a hard choice to say which one I like better, but if cooking indoors and in a hurry, a nonstick pan and a bit of oil is a far faster fix than firing up the barbecue on a balcony, or even heating up the cast-iron grill pan.

I won’t bother lecturing you on the sort of things you should eat it with, because frankly, it goes with any sort of salad that I can imagine (with the exception of perhaps sweet Oriental dressings), and perfectly well in a sandwich, or even on its own, as finger food laid out on a plate.  So, I will stick with general directions of how to prepare it, and the rest is really up to you.   It goes magnificently well with acidic foods – tomatoes, lemon juice or balsamic vinegar, and I imagine it’d not go amiss with some citrus in the salad, perhaps grapefruit pieces or such.  I think that of quick-prep dishes, and all-season foods, this is one of my all-time favorites, and also one of the most versatile – as a warm topping to a cold salad in summer, or as a vegetarian dish (for the vegetarians you know) at your barbecue, or else as a sandwich filler, or with a side of warm potatoes or even some herbed, buttered gnocci in colder weather, and I could go on and on…

But, the how-to is both, simple and easy.

1. Take your halloumi block.  It is usually sold in a plastic pouch filled with a bit of brine, just like Feta.  Cut open the pouch over the sink (unless you like a wet mess on your countertop), and blot the cheese dry with a paper towel.
2. Cut the cheese with a sharp knife into crosswise slices 5mm-1cm thick (your preference, I aim somewhere between the two myself).
3. Preheat a nonstick pan on medium heat and put a little bit of oil of your choice in it.  I have used anything from butter to extra-virgin olive oil, and plain refined vegetable oil, but I found that what I like best is cold-pressed edible rapeseed (Canola) oil.  It has a very gentle nutty aroma, and adds a gorgeous golden shade to the frying cheese.  I use 1-2 tablespoons of oil per block of cheese, but that, too, is up to you in the end.
4. Once oil is hot, put your cheese slices into the pan, leaving about 1cm space between them at the very least (they will expand in area as they cook), and let them fry for a few minutes, checking occasionally until the underside is a desired golden color.  Flip and fry on other side.
5. Chili (fresh, chopped or dry flakes), chopped garlic, and dried thyme or oregano work well as additions during frying.  Fresh herbs such as parsley, thyme, oregano or coriander leaves are fantastic on the cheese once it’s cooked… but I get ahead of myself here.
6. Once cheese is fried, take it out onto a wooden board or a plate with some paper towels and let it cool a minute, then either cut into desired size bits, or just pile into your sandwich/onto your salad plate, and eat.  That last bit is what it’s all about after all!

An Ode To Bacon

Oh bacon, thee maketh my heart gladder.
Thee maketh my stews heartier and my soups flavourful,
and you impart thy divine fragrance to the chicken or the beef
– or the greens of the field among which I place thee.
Truly, for all the savoury dishes, thy glory shall be great!

So yes.  I love bacon.  In fact, I don’t think I know anyone (save some vegans and perhaps vegetarians – don’t know many of either kind closely for the obvious reason of them not liking me much) who does not like bacon.  And when pressed, I suspect that even those die-hard ethical eaters love the flavour of bacon, if perhaps not the idea.

Actually, where it comes to my favourite animal-based things to eat and use in savoury food to improve its flavour as an ingredient (other than meat, obviously, which is in its own category), I suspect bacon has only cheese to compete with – and in many cases it wins.  (But honestly, when it comes to cheese and bacon, why pick just one?!)

The photo above is from a few days ago, when I have discovered that apparently, happy, well-fed chickens raised to Swedish farm standards, grow into (utterly delicious) humongous monsters.  For reference, that’s a large restaurant-sized plate.  And that’s a cooked chicken breast on it.  And yes, they were 250g each raw (without water added).  So once I brought them home, I was left face-to-chicken-breast with them and the contemplation of what to do.  Mind you, that was before my luggage (and the spices therein) had arrived in Sweden, and so all I had at my disposal were fresh veggies, garlic, salt, oil and a bit of black pepper.  But – eureka! – I also had bacon and cheese.

The salad alongside them was planned in advance (and a separate recipe), but for the bacon-wrapped cheese-stuffed chicken, you really do not need that much:

• 2 chicken breasts (to serve 2, obviously)
• 1 large garlic clove (or 2 smaller ones – can’t skimp on the garlic!)
• 1-2 tablespoons butter (I use lightly salted butter here and do not salt the inside of the chicken pocket)
• 2 slices of cheese (I used a good cheddar in this instance, but any you like will do)
• 5 bacon slices (streaky, with a bit of stretch to it – make sure it’s defrosted completely if using after freezing)
• salt and black pepper to taste (I like lots of the latter, and again this is up to you.  Can also use chili flakes.)
• 1 teaspoon vegetable oil (optional)

Instructions:

• Preheat oven to 220°C
• Pat dry the chicken breasts and lay on cutting board.  Cut a pocket into the thicker side of each one, carefully
• Slice garlic clove(s) thinly and insert half the slices into each chicken breast
• Place half the butter into each pocket over the garlic
• Place a slice of cheese into each pocket as well
• Season the outside of the chicken breasts with salt and pepper
• You can secure the edges of the pocket with a toothpick, or -
• -  in lieu of one, you can tie them with bacon:

• Lightly oil the baking dish you plan to use with the vegetable oil (optional – only to make clean up easier)
• Lay 2 strips of bacon in an X shape on a cutting board, and position breast top side down on them
• Pull the edges together and tie them in a knot on the underside of the chicken breast – one after another
• Place breasts into the baking dish knot-side down.  You can cover the dish with aluminium foil for the first half of the cooking time, removing it after 30 minutes
• Cut the last bacon strip into 2 and lay the halves over the chicken breasts
• Place dish in oven and turn oven down to 180°C
• Cook for 1 hour to 1 hour 10 minutes.  You can switch the grill element (broiler) on for a little while at the end to brown the bacon if necessary.
• Take out and allow to rest for 5 minutes.
• Cheese may leak out of the chicken some – I just spoon it and some of the butter over the chicken when it’s plated.

Serve with your side or salad of choice and rejoyce, for the Holy Bacon is great and wonderful and bringeth much joy to the chicken, and makes it juicy and flavourful and not at all dried out or stringy!

Amen.