Baking

#Extraordinary Bread – Khachapuri (Georgian Cheese Bread)

Several years ago, I watched the movie “Julie and Julia” with some of my friends. The movie involves two story lines. One details Julia Child’s start in the cooking profession. The other follows a blogger named Julie as she challenges herself to cook all of the recipes in Julia Child’s first book, 524 recipes, in one year. I enjoyed the movie and always thought cooking through a cookbook would be a fun thing to do.

When King Arthur Baking Company announced last week that they were having a contest (randomly drawn winner) for bakers to make any of the twelve recipes in the Extraordinary Bread collection, I thought I would give it a try. I plan to try out each recipe and post some tips and suggestions with each.

While I am definitely not the writer that Julie Powell was, nor are my cooking/baking skills any where near a professional like Julia Child, I do enjoy trying new things.

Today, I made Khachapuri. The bread is shaped into flat “boat-like” ovals and filled with a mix of cheeses and topped with an egg. Based upon the ingredients, I assumed the bread would taste somewhat like a flattened bagel. With that in mind, I made some modifications to half of the “boats”.

For the recipe, visit the King Arthur Baking website.

Measured out each of the dough ingredients. My flour tends to be rather compact in my storage container.
So, for greater accuracy and a better bake, I would strongly suggest weighing the flour rather than going by the cup measurements.
Dough mixed and kneaded in bread machine.
Cheese filling combined in mini food processor.

The recipe makes four bread boats. I knew that my family would likely not eat all four of these. So, I only made a half batch of the cheese filling to be used with two of the boats. For the other two boats, I combined 1/4 cup Ricotta Cheese with 1/4 cup Cinnamon Sweet Bits (found here).

The recipe says to roll out the dough into ovals.
I found it worked well to just push the dough into ovals with my hands – less mess, no need to wash the rolling pin.
Two ovals were filled with cheese filling and the edges turned up.
Two ovals were filled with the ricotta-cinnamon mix and the edges rolled up.
Before baking, I brushed the edges with egg wash. I sprinkled Swedish Pearl Sugar on the edges of the cinnamon boats.
An egg was cracked over the cheese filling prior to the last ten minutes of baking.
The Ricotta-Cinnamon filled bread tasted like a cinnamon bagel with cream cheese.

Each type of Khachapuri tasted really good, but I especially liked the Ricotta-Cinnamon combination.

The loaves are rather big – each loaf is enough for two or three people to eat. I think next time I make these, I will make twelve small loaves rather than the four large loaves.

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