Hot and Spicy Cheese Bread
My family owns a bakery in Madison, Wisconsin named Stella’s. And it isn’t just any bakery. It is a famous bakery, famous for its Hot and Spicy Cheese Bread. The bread is everything most people here in New York seem to be avoiding– gluten, butter, and cheese.
The common assumption is that our cheese bread is like Papa John’s cheese sticks or some sort of cheese-whizz pull apart nonsense. But no, Hot and Spicy Cheese Bread is nothing like that.
Our Cheese Bread is a quarter pound of all natural Monterey Jack and Provolone tied into a knot of Vienna Bread. Our Vienna Bread holds no resemblance to the bread you see when you google Vienna Bread which looks uniform, hard, and generic. Our bread is the beautiful child born from the marriage of challah and brioche. It is eggy. It is sweet. It is light but rich; sweet but salty; chewy but soft. It is everything a white bread should be.
Red pepper flakes and oregano are added to the dough and dusted on top. The spices cut through the other flavors, giving the bread a kick and making it spicy. We serve it on Saturday mornings at the Dane County Farmers Market in Madison, Wisconsin. The market is the largest producer-run market in the country and makes any of the green markets in New York City seem tiny. Since 1972, one hundred and fifty farmers, bakers, gardeners, and cheesemakers have crowded around the State Capital Square every Saturday from April through October to sell their products.
And every Saturday, Stella’s Bakery takes a corner spot. The market organizers leave us extra space for the lines that form when a truckload of Cheese Bread comes in from the bakery. We bake the bread throughout the morning so it is always fresh out of the oven and the smell of the hot bread coming off the truck attracts half the market. The cheese is still bubbling and melting when we hand the bags off to customers. Most Saturdays, the bread is sold out before the pans even begin to cool.
When I explain our family bakery to New Yorkers, I usually have to slow down and repeat myself here.
Is there really a quarter pound of cheese? They’ll ask.
Yes, you heard me correctly. There really is a quarter pound in every single loaf. And when you hold a bag of the bread, you can feel the weight. Technically each loaf is supposed to be shared, but I advise groups of four to get a minimum of three loaves. Walking around the market, looking at the other stands on a beautiful Wisconsin Saturday morning in the early fall, the bread will warm your hands as you tear chunks off. You don’t even notice your loaf is gone until it's all gone.
Part of what makes the bread so good is that the cheese we use is real cheese, all natural and from Wisconsin. Although Max Harn Sr., the original bakery owner and my grandfather, would joke it came from Minnesota or, to every Wisconsinites horror, Illinois.
Max Harn Sr.
Max Harn Sr. was a fixture at the Saturday morning markets, to the point where my young cousins assumed he owned the entire place. He used to sit by our stand in a chair, counting cash, eating danish, and joking with anyone who got too close.
Stella’s has occupied a corner spot at the market since the summer of 1988. The bakery is now famous for its bread but it started as a farm stand. My grandpa Max, a navy man turned furniture salesman turned farmer, struggled to turn a good crop. It was my grandma, Coralia Harn, who noticed the only farm stands having any success at the morning markets were the bakeries. So she figured she’d give it a shot.
Nevermind that she had never professionally baked before. She had followed my grandpa from Panama to Wisconsin in 1963 after he had been stationed in the canal zone. At 19, she had no idea he would become a larger-than-life man who looked like someone you’d trust to know a good pastry. And he did. He made cheese danishes the size of your face and sweet breads and famed chocolate chip cookies. Once, he told me one of his secrets was always to use whole milk and no matter what, double the butter.
Coralia Harn
It was my grandma who was the one up every Friday night well past midnight finishing everything for the morning market. The work was hard but she said it was nothing compared to farming. She made the few recipes she knew– cheese empanadas and Jamaican Christmas cakes. Coralia named the bakery after the woman who taught her these recipes– her grandma Stella. Stella, who was born in Kingston, Jamaica, immigrated to Panama, married at 14 and outlived six of her nine children; hadn’t just taught my own grandma how to bake, Stella taught Coralia how to persevere despite the odds.
Up until one fateful Friday night in 1988 the bakery was persevering but not necessarily succeeding. Like many Friday nights, my grandma was alone in the farmhouse kitchen in a sleep-deprived stupor. While her husband slept, she was trying to get everything finished for the Saturday market. In the mix of a cramped kitchen, she accidentally dumped the cheese empanada filling into a stand mixer full of bread. And rather than waste a whole night's work, she baked it.
My grandpa ate a whole loaf first thing the next morning. The best bread he’d ever tasted he said. Before they sold anything else that morning, they were out of the new invention, the late night kitchen disaster. The recipe was tweaked over the course of the summer. They added red pepper flakes and herbs from the farm and my Aunt figured out how to shape the bread to keep the cheese inside.
But for the most part, when you buy Hot and Spicy Cheese Bread at the Saturday morning Farmers Market, it is mostly the same as the one my grandma made thirty-three years ago.
Stella’s Cake From Grandma Edna
Pineapple Pound Cake
ingredients
– 1 dozen eggs
– 1¼ pound butter (must be salted)
– 1½ pound sugar
– 1½ pound flour
– 1 - 16 ounce can sliced pineapple
method
1. Separate yolks and whites.
2. Blend yolks, butter, and sugar.
3. Beat whites in a separate bowl until you have a meringue.
4. Add flour to the egg, butter, and sugar mix.
5. Fold in the egg whites until barely mixed together. Stop before whites break down.
6. Place pineapple slices at the bottom of buttered bundt pan.
7. Pour mixture into bundt pan.
8. Bake at 350ºF for 30 minutes at 300ºF for another 30 minutes.
9. De-pan right away when finished so the pineapple doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pan.
Stella’s recipe for cheese bread and for the exact cheese mixture is one of Wisconsin's most closely guarded secrets. All I can do is encourage a home baker to experiment with this recipe and to add cheese as they see fit.
To quote my Aunt when I asked her for the recipe “Can't share the recipe. But you could just say something about adding cheese to peoples bread dough recipes, it can be sourdough, multigrain, really anything.”
Brioche Bread
***(this is not Stella’s Vienna Bread nor is this recipe technically approved by Stella’s)
ingredients
– 2 ¾ cups white flour
– ¼ cup whole milk
– 4 tbsp sugar
– 1 ¼ tsp salt
– 1 instant yeast packet or 1 tBSP
– 4 eggs, cold
– 12 tbsp butter at room temperature
method
1. Mix all ingredients except butter together in a mixer or knead by hand. Start with the milk, then add the yeast, then the sugar, then slowly start to work the flour in. The dough needs to be stretchy and not too sticky. Adjust the flour as needed.
2. Add the butter very slowly and knead for an additional 10 minutes. I recommend a stand mixer with a dough hook.
3. Cover and let rise somewhere warm until the dough has doubled in size.
4. Remove from the bowl, form, then let rise for an additional 3 hours.
5. Bake at 350º F for 30-35 minutes. Do not under bake. Do not over bake.
CLAIRE ELIZABETH HARNENZ is from the culinary paradise of Wisconsin but currently lives in Brooklyn. She is an artist, writer, and adamant defender of cheddar cheese. Follow her on Instagram @claire_harnenz