Over the last few weeks, the day job has had to take priority over the blog, but worry not food fans, I’m back with a classic Slow The Cook Down recipe. My bacon and cheese bread bowl is filthy indulgent and packed full of flavour. Four cheeses, melted together with red jalapeños and chives, stuffed into a hollowed out loaf of bread ready for some first class dipping action.
For some reason, this post has been one of the hardest I’ve had to put together. Not the actual recipe development and cooking (it’s melted cheese with bacon people!), but the photos and writing of the post have been really tricky – this has been in my drafts for a good week!
Food photography is something that really doesn’t come naturally to me, and I do tend to get a tad frustrated when something just isn’t working. I use natural light for my photos, if it’s a grey sky, which it often is in sunny blighty, my technical skills often aren’t quite up to the challenge! I found writing about this dish extremely hard as well – maybe that’s why I’ve gone off on a tangent a bit with this post! I mean, it shouldn’t be this hard for me to write about how yummy this cheese and bacon bread bowl is!
My brain has been pretty pre-occupied with my work life since Christmas, working on a challenging, but very exciting project, and it seems as though all of my blogging knowledge has been thrown completely out of the window! I’m hoping that getting this post out there will help me get on track again!
Lesson learnt….work less, post more, keep cooking and take a bloody photography course! And while I’m busy with that, do give this bread bowl a go at home, I promise it won’t be as much stress as writing about it was for me!
If you’re looking for more carby, cheesy deliciousness, check out my Pizza Stuffed Bread!
Ingredients
- 400g loaf of tiger bread (or any small loaf you can lay your hands on!)
- 1tbsp mayonnaise
- 200g smoked streaky bacon
- 300g soft cheese
- 100g grated mozerella
- 100g grated strong cheddar
- 1tbsp olive oil
- 1tsp English mustard
- 20g finely chopped chives
- 100g finely chopped red jalapeños
- 25g grated parmesan
- 50g salted butter
- 2 finely chopped garlic cloves
- couple of sprigs of finely chopped parsley
Pre-heat the oven to 180ºc
Slice off the top of the bread loaf, around 3cm, and leave to one side. Hollow out the loaf to create a bowl, take as much as you can out, without weakening the structure of the bread. Spread the mayonnaise around the inside of the bread bowl and place in the oven for around 20minutes until the bread is just turning toasty.
Fry the bacon until nice and crispy and leave to one side.
In a mixing bowl, combine the cheeses, olive oil, mustard, chives and jalapeños. Mix well. Once the bacon has cooled, crumble this in and combine the mix.
Take the top of the loaf that was cut off and slice lengthways down the middle, and cut the lengths into bitesize pieces. Put the loaf and these pieces of bread onto a baking tray.
In a small pan, place the butter, parsley and garlic and gently melt the butter. Pour this over the smaller pieces of the loaf.
Spoon the cheese mix into the bread bowl. Pile it up as it will melt down during cooking. Place the tray in the oven for around 20-30minutes until the pieces of the loaf are golden brown. Remove the pieces of bread from the tray and leave to one side. Pop the bread bowl under the grill for 5minutes to colour the top.
Serve to the table hot with a variety of dipping implements!
