Stuffed Bread
My Late mother-in-law used to make something the family called "stuffed bread". It was just frozen bread dough from the store, thawed, stuffed with sausage and cheese, and baked. Last night I was charged with the task of making Stuffed Bread but with homemade bread. I decided to use the recipe for Italian Bread [1], because I have made it a couple of times before and found it to be delicious.
So I followed the direction in making the bread, and as it did it's two hour rise I cooked up three sausage fillings (one hot, one sweet, and one vegetarian) and got my cheese ready. I punched the bread down, let it rest for another 30 minutes, then divided it into three and ran into a little trouble. My instructions on the actual stuffing of stuffed bread were not what you might call explicit. I decided to try patting the dough into a rectangular(ish) shape, put filling on one end, and then roll the dough up starting at the filling end into a log shape. Then rest for 20 minutes, a final shaping, about an hour for the dough to double, and then the bake. (okay, so it didnt work quite that well; I realized that my oven was too small to fit all three loaves and had to bake one loaf first, and then the other two, so one was just about right and the other two were slightly overproofed when put into the oven, but they were all tasty and I was pleasantly suprised at how nice even the overproofed ones turned out.)
The only real problem I had was with the filling. With two of the loaves, the filling ended up, atleast at one end, right at the surface of the dough. It even broke through at one point on one of the loaves. The third one was a little better but the filling was still unevenly distributed and I would have liked to have fit a little more in it but dont know if I could with my current technique.
So my question is this: How might I better go about stuffing this bread?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
fem