Cheese Hollow Loaf

Hello! It’s Alix! It’s been months! Sorry about that! Enough exclamation marks now, on to the recipe! (!)

It’s from our old friend – Make A Meal of Cheese from the Cheese Information Service (no, really). Here’s the cover again, just because it’s great:

For a book about cheese you’d think they might have made more of an effort with the illustration, but no.

I like cheese, bread and meat, and am a fan of eg, substituting bread for pasta in bolognaise meals, so had high hopes for this recipe and its combining of some of my favourite things. Here’s how the book thinks this recipe comes out:

Mm. Vaguely remininscent of Pedigree Chum topped with solid Swarfega, but mostly appetising in appearance  (Ok, it looks kind of grim, but I wanted to make it in spite of this. Or because of. I can’t remember now. Leave me alone).

I followed the recipe, it was very easy. The only remarkable part was the cheddar mountain I grated:

Here’s how it looked before it went in the oven:

And the first slice:

The meat in the original photo looks like dog food, but this is reminding me a lot more of cat food. I once opened a tin of cat food and thought it smelled kind of…good, and there was that time I ate a cat biscuit for a quid, but something about this is offputting even to me. The tongue of melted cheese is, well, just, well.

Tasting notes

It was bland as anything; another poorly seasoned seventies recipe strikes again. More unfortunately the bread was much much too hard to eat, especially the top, which I ended up discarding.  Obviously it’s been baked twice – I think soaking the whole thing in milk might have made it more  edible? Or a more saucy meat concoction? (or just not cooking it in the first place).

It also collapsed upon slicing, viz:

After eating a couple of slices for my tea I spent the evening feeling very unusual and vowed not to eat any more of it. Obviously the following day I returned from work and ate more – actually, it had improved with age and was holding together nicely. The now solid lump of cheese running throughout was troubling though.

Hollowed by Alix