Sour Dough Bread with Sausage and Cheese

Sour Dough Bread with Sausage and Cheese in the Dough
Cutting board, compliments of my dear husband!

This weekend I decided to make sour dough bread with sausage and cheese baked into the dough.  I used my regular sour dough recipe to make the dough.  It takes about three days to make the bread in the winter because my kitchen is the coldest room in the house.  The rising time can take up to 6 or 8 hours on the counter!  I started this dough on Friday night, and I'm serving the warm bread to my kids today (Sunday afternoon).  It was worth the wait!

Gouda cheese and hard sausage

For sausage I used  some left over hard sausage that we served on New Years Day as an appetizer.  I chopped it into 1/4 inch cubes. The cheese is gouda, coarsely shredded.  

My firm starter after rising.

The firm starter on the baking scale

I used my baking scale to make up the dough.  The recipe is 92.5% firm starter, so I measured that first and work backwards with the other ingredients.  I used regular bread flour for this bread.

Final dough before rising.

I incorporated the meat and cheese into the dough during the second half of kneading it.  It went in pretty easily, but made the dough really moist.  I had to add more flour to adjust the moisture in the dough.  Even with the extra flour, the final dough was still a little on the wet side.  I left it overnight to rise in my big bowl.  It did actually double in size after about 8 hours of waiting.

Final dough after rising.  It smells great!

I decided to make three small loaves.  Here they are in the pans before rising.  They came out great!  The final rise only took four hours for them to fill up the pans.  I cooked the bread at 400 degrees for about 30 minutes, until the temperature was above 180 degrees. (that's F, not C).  It came out delicious.  The bread was really moist.  The sausage made the bread a little salty.  I couldn't really taste the cheese.  I plan to make it again!

Three wonderful loaves of bread ready to rise on the counter for four hours.