Spicy Cheese Bread: The Best Baked Good in Wisconsin

Not a fan of prose? Jump straight to the recipe!

Wisconsin: land of beer, bratwurst, and cheddar cheese. I consumed copious amounts of all three during my time as a grad student at UW-Madison, but none is the food that I miss the most. That honor is reserved for spicy cheese bread.

Hot and Spicy

Specifically, Stella’s spicy cheese bread, a staple food of any trip to the Dane County Farmers’ Market¹. Summers in Wisconsin are gorgeous, and the market is a must-do destination every week when the weather is nice.

The Stella's stand at the Dane County Farmer's market. It will have that big of a crowd around it (if not larger) for the duration of the market.
Credit: Adam Fagan via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

We’d walk the mile or so from our apartment to the Capital and enter the market across from State Street. This is just downstream of Stella’s — foot traffic in the market is strictly one-way² — and I’m not too proud to admit that we would cut against the flow for the 10 feet or so necessary to get to the side of the bakery’s booth which was dispensing the bread. Then we would wait patiently in the informal queue of customers before handing over the cash for our fresh-from-the-oven prize.

And what a prize it was! Over a pound of a sweet, tender, yeasty bread spotted with mildly spicy red pepper flakes, stuffed with just so much gooey, melty cheese. We’d join the regular flow of pedestrians, bread in hand, ripping off chunks and stuffing our faces while browsing the other stalls of the market.

We moved from Madison over six years ago now, and ever since I’ve been trying to fill a spicy-cheese-bread-sized hole in my life.

Reverse Engineering

At first I thought getting another hit of that cheesy goodness would be as simple as Googling “Spicy Cheese Bread recipe” and following along. “Surely someone’s done this already”, I figured, and indeed there are many hits. But as I discovered after attempting several of the most promising ones with decidedly mixed results, none of them properly reproduced the elusive combination of taste and texture of authentic Stella’s. If I wanted to make authentic Spicy Cheese Bread at home I would have to figure it out myself.

An excerpt of my experimental notebook/window into my madness. Because of a combination of competing demands on my time and my family's limited tolerance for mediocre cheese bread I could only experiment every once in a while, so writing down what I had done and what the results were was critical.

Using the internet recipes as a jumping off point, I started making test loaves, tweaking the ingredients based on my understanding of breadmaking and a hearty dose of intuition. The first several attempts did not go well — I’m not a professional recipe developer by any stretch³ — and it wasn’t until I finally got my hands on another real loaf of Stella’s⁴ that I started to make progress.

It turns out that Stella’s Spicy Cheese Bread conforms to FDA food labeling rules, which require food producers to list both the ingredients in order of weight as well as the total weight of the food⁵. Additionally, the Spicy Cheese Bread bag loudly claimed that each loaf contained a quarter pound of cheese. Combining these weights with my general understanding of breadmaking put me on the right track, and a few iterations later I had a loaf that I was happy with.

I should be clear: this recipe is not as good as the real thing — Stella’s has over three decades of baking experience, and access to professional equipment that I (and probably you) don’t. If you live within driving distance of the Dane County Farmer’s Market you should absolutely go there to get your cheese bread fix! But if you’re a Wisconsin expat, a tourist who stopped by the Market one Saturday and got hooked, or just someone who thinks a combination of cheese, bread, and spice sounds like a match made in heaven, I think this recipe is the very best substitute possible. Try it and see!

The Recipe

Active Time: 1 hour Total Time: 3.5 hours

Ingredients

Dough

• 280 grams bread flour
• 140 grams water
• 40 grams granulated sugar
• 2 tablespoons unsalted butter, room-temperature (~30 grams)
• 1 teaspoon instant yeast (~4 grams)
• 1/2 teaspoon salt (~4 grams)
• 1 large egg
• 1 teaspoon dried parsley
• 1 teaspoon dried chives
• 1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes
• 70 grams mild provolone
• 70 grams monterey jack

Topping

• 1 large egg
• 1 tablespoon water
• 1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes

Tools

• Stand mixer
• Small cake pan
• Large pot, large enough to fit over the cake pan
• Baking sheet
• Cooking spray
• Plastic wrap
• Rolling pin
• Pastry brush

Notes

• If you only have active dry yeast, use the same amount but first warm up some of the water to ~100 degrees F, then dissolve the yeast in the water for 5 minutes.
• You may want to adjust the amount of red pepper flakes depending on your spice tolerance and the particular brand of pepper flakes you have. My kids refused to eat the bread if it had any pepper flakes on it, so I usually omit them entirely (you can see that there are no pepper flakes in the loaf in my pictures below, if you look closely enough).
• The provolone should not be smoked or sharp. It may be difficult to find a block of provolone that isn’t smoked/sharp, in which case you can use pre-sliced bagged provolone — just make sure the ingredients list is just the cheese and doesn’t have any added ingredients like starch.

Instructions

1. Put all of the dough ingredients except for the cheeses in the bowl of a stand mixer.
2. Attach the dough hook to the stand mixer and run at low speed until the dough comes together, about a minute. Then turn to medium-low speed and knead about 5 minutes. The dough should be strong enough to hang off the hook without breaking. It may be very sticky: that’s fine for right now.

3. Remove the bowl from the stand mixer and cover with plastic wrap. Let rise in a warm place for about 45-70 minutes, until about doubled in volume. Check after an hour or so; rise times can be variable.

4. While the dough is rising, take both cheeses out of the fridge and cut into roughly 1/2-inch cubes (if provolone is pre-sliced, cut into 1/2-inch slices). Leave cheese out on counter to come to room temperature (cold cheese can slow down the second rise).
5. Clear a flat workspace and spray it with cooking spray. Also spray the rolling pin and cake pan. Turn the dough out onto the greased workspace. If it is still sticky, so sticky that working with it is difficult, dust with additional flour until it becomes possible to handle it.
6. Roll out the dough into about a 15”x12” rectangle. Scatter the cheese over the entire area of the dough save for about 1/2-inch on all sides. Roll dough up along the short axis to make a log and pinch ends to seal.

7. Turn log seam-side down, then roll it out with your hands until it is about 25” long — long enough for you to tie the dough into a loose knot by looping one end under the other and pulling up through the middle, which you should do next.
8. Gently place the dough into the cake pan, recover with the plastic wrap, and let rise in a warm place for another 45-70 minutes. Dough may not quite double in bulk but should at least be noticeably bigger than before, and feel softer to the touch than it was right after it was knotted.

9. While dough is rising, move the oven racks to a low enough position to comfortably fit the pot, place the pot in the oven, and preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.
10. When dough has risen, place cake pan with dough on the baking sheet, remove the pot from the oven, then place the pot upside-down over the cake pan and on the baking sheet. Put sheet-pan-pot assemblage into the oven and bake for 20 minutes.

11. While the dough bakes, make the egg wash by scrambling the egg inside a small container, then mixing in the water. Get out the red pepper flakes and set aside.
12. Remove sheet-pan-pot assemblage from the oven, take off pot, then brush the egg wash on the dough and then sprinkle with the red pepper flakes. Return the sheet and pan to the oven without the pot.

13. Bake for an additional 10-15 minutes, until the crust is browned and/or you can’t resist the delicious smell anymore. Remove pan from oven and let bread cool for at least 10 minutes before digging in. Optionally, remove bread from pan and place on a cooling rack to speed up the process.