Okay, so a few weeks ago I had this idea that I wanted to try making bread with wine. Well, why not? Beer bread is wonderful, so it seemed only logical that a red wine bread would be lovely too. Or not… 
The thing is a simple red wine bread might have been just fine, but I had to go and complicate things by deciding to add some left over ravioli filling (goat cheese, feta cheese, spinach, and chicken sausage) into the dough with the wine. Silly me, but hey…I like to experiment. Sometimes I’m successful and sometimes…well…I’m not.
So before I started baking, I wanted to see what bread recipes I could find which used a sweet red wine and meat and then try to adapt the recipe. I found one and made the bread.Here’s what the bread looked like when it was done
So how did it taste? Well, Kemal and I both thought it was delicious. The outside was crunchy while the inside was soft and moist. We thought it was a little too salty, and that’s surprising since I like a lot of salt. I was surprised how the flavor of the wine really came through, and I would have liked the flavor to have been more subtle.
But even though the bread was delicious, it didn’t set well on our stomachs. I had a couple of slices for lunch and it seemed to lay on my stomach hard. I think it was the wine, but I’m not sure.
Mostly, the biggest problem we had with this bread is that we both had this psychological thing going on in feeling the texture of the meat as we ate the bread. Now, I know this makes no sense at all. We both eat meat, and when we do, we eat bread with it. We eat sandwiches (meat inside of bread), so I can’t understand why would we have this psychological aversion to eating meat baked inside the bread. It makes no sense whatsoever, and we tried to rationalize how we eat bread and meat together all the time. It didn’t work though.
We obviously have issues, and we accept that our aversion is irrational and makes no sense. It was a delicious bread though…just one we will not consume again. Next time we’ll leave the sausage out of the bread and eat it on the plate instead. As for putting wine in bread…I don’t think I’ll try that again either. I think I’ll stick with a simple beer bread next time I want spirits in my dough.
