Cheese and Onion Tear and Share Bread

I love a good foodie television show. There’s Masterchef – tears and shouty John and Gregg (who’s restaurant I did work experience at last year!). There’s Nigella’s series – fairy lights, dressing gowns and ‘cookie crumbs tumbling like Mexican mud’…There’s Nigel Slater and his gorgeous garden, Simon Hopkinson with slow-mo falling egg graphics or Sophie Dahl’s series where she cooks and reads poetry. Currently, there is The Great British Bake Off – which the week before last featured this delicious bread.Each week of the Bake Off is themed – and so this obviously came from Bread week, a challenging one that I know I would have found really hard. One of the contestants Jason, an 18 year old baker from Croydon, made this and after watching I couldn’t get it out of my mind. Melting cheese, soft bread and a crunchy top plus the onions in the mix – what’s not to like? Happily, the recipe is featured in the new book to go along with the show, and the next day another yeast adventure was going on in my kitchen. As I’m still very much a bread and yeast novice, this took me ages to make. It was an enjoyable process, just long because rolling, stuffing (with two fillings) and folding nineteen balls of bread dough is not going to be a quick process. Add in three sets of rising times and in turned into quite a days baking but the end result was worth it, and could have been even more so had I got it perfect. The problem was I placed all the nineteen dough balls too far apart before they went in the oven so they didn’t join together to properly make a tear and share bread. This meant they were a bit drier then would have been nice and so went stale faster. I had some straight out the oven when the cheese inside was still melting and warm and it was delicious! Sadly one person cannot eat 19 rolls very quickly :( Still, I would recommend the recipe as I think this could be irresistible if done properly! There are a couple more recipes from the Bake Off book that I want to make, so hopefully I’ll get a chance to do them soon. Enjoy :)