If you have a stand mixer, then you'll find that this rosemary cheddar bread is about as hands-off as a bread recipe can be. Dry ingredients into bowl, add water slowly while mixing with the dough hook, and knead until the dough forms a tight ball. At most, you might need to gently nudge some of the dry ingredients down from the sides of the bowl.

So, what if you don't have a stand mixer?  No worries.  There's nothing complex about this dough that would prevent you from using a hand mixer (again, with dough hooks) or your hands.  Hand mixing will obviously take longer, and you'll want to knead the dough on a lightly floured surface.  As with the stand mixer, the dough is finished when it forms a fairly tight ball.  I do find that this dough is just a touch sticky, so try rubbing a little olive oil into your hands before you get into the more serious kneading stages.  This will help keep the dough from sticking to you without requiring a bunch of additional flour.

Rosemary cheddar bread is great for novice bakers, but I will freely admit that there are a handful of kitchen tools that make it easier and more consistent.  As I mentioned at the beginning of the recipe notes, this bread (and indeed all bread) is way easier to make if you have a kitchen scale.  Volumes of flour are inconsistent at best, and a scale means not having to bother with fractional measurements.  The recipe does include both volume and weight measurements, but I strongly encourage you to use the latter if you are able.

I like to use a pizza stone when I bake, as it helps to keep my oven temperature even, and it helps give my bread a crispy crust.  If you don't have one, you can put cast iron pans in your oven to help regulate the temperature, and you can bake the bread in a hot pan or casserole (think Le Creuset style pots).  This does limit your bread shaping options a bit (see below), but it makes great bread.

Finally, you want to be able to score the surface of your bread.  I'm an ardent aficionado of safety razors (for my face, that is), so I simply set aside a safety razor blade in a container in the pantry for this express purpose.  You can buy safety razor blades from baking specialty stores too, but it's probably cheaper to seek out a small pack of them online or at a drug store.  Be careful with them though, as they are incredibly sharp.  If you don't have a razor blade, use a very thin, very sharp knife. Be warned - a dull knife will drag through the dough, rather than cleanly slice it.

I generally form this dough into either a simple boule or an fat oval loaf. After turning the dough out onto a surface (I use a silicone baking sheet), I gather the edges of the dough one-at-a-time and tuck them into the center/top to shape and stretch the dough, then flip it so the seam is down.

This is a pretty sizeable loaf of bread, and you can most definitely split it into two smaller loaves, shaped the same way.  You can also shape them into longer, thinner loaves.

This bread also bakes well in a pan (especially a silicone one, but a greased metal tin will do), but once again we need to consider the size.  Unless you have a monster-sized bread pan, this amount of dough is probably going to overflow badly.

Now, this may be odd to say about 'rosemary cheddar' bread, but you can actually make this without rosemary... or without cheddar.  Omissions and substitutions are easy to manage, and the options are diverse.

I've made this with and without rosemary many times, and it's great both ways. If you don't have fresh rosemary and you just want to make a nice cheese bread, it'll work wonderfully. I don't use dried rosemary here because a) it tastes stronger, and b) it's often very hard, and I hate getting a dry rosemary needle in my mouth. That being said, if you really don't want to skip out on the rosemary flavour but dried is all you have, you can substitute about 1/2 tsp of finely ground dried rosemary.

I generally use an old/sharp cheddar for this - nothing wildly expensive, but something with enough flavour to come through in the baked bread.  Any number of flavourful aged cheeses will also work nicely here - think gouda, Emmental, gruyere, hard Italian cheeses, or some combination of these.

You can also consider adding other ingredients to this base loaf to create a little more diversity.  Oregano and garlic would go beautifully with the rosemary and cheddar - or on their own!

Finally, a word about flour ratios.  I've tested quite a few different blends and I'm fond of the 3:1 white/whole-wheat ratio given in the recipe.  You can go with all white flour too - though honestly, I don't find the impact on the flavour worth the loss of nutrients and the increase in glycemic index.  I personally wouldn't go past a 1:1 ratio of whole wheat and white as it makes the bread a bit denser and earthier than I like, plus it increases your rising/proofing times quite a bit.  I haven't tried this bread with whole grain or alternative grain flours (e.g. rye and spelt), but if you're familiar with working with these, I don't think it would be difficult to work them into this recipe.  If you want a sneaky way to make this bread a little healthier with very little effort, try adding ~1 tablespoon of ground flax seeds.