Ham and Cheese Bread

The Grillmaster has been known to come home from the grocery store with bags full of cheap meat. Some of it is meat I would never eat, so it ends up in our freezer for eternity or until I get the urge to clean (which isn’t often). “But it was such a good deal,” he always says.

I’m originally from Virginia and we know our ham. When the Grillmaster arrived with something called “turkey ham,” I wasn’t sure whether to be horrified or happy that he was concerned about fat and calories.

Patricia Wells has a recipe for Ham & Cheese Bread in her new cookbook, Salad as a Meal. Although it looked delicious, it didn’t make my short list of recipes to try because, well, it’s bread and I’m a person with diabetes. Imagine my surprise upon discovering that the amount of carb in this bread wasn’t a problem, but the amounts of saturated fat and cholesterol were a tad high. Enter the turkey ham!

I couldn’t find Comté cheese, so I used Gruyère instead. I made four changes to Patricia’s recipe and reduced the calories, fat and cholesterol significantly while increasing the protein and fiber by just a hair. I also managed to increase the sodium. I guess that’s the downside of using turkey ham. My changes? I used a mixture of whole-wheat pastry flour and white flour instead of all white flour, an egg substitute instead of eggs, the aforementioned turkey ham instead of ham and I skipped the olives. (The olive omission was a personal preference; I didn’t leave them out for nutritional reasons.)

The resulting Turkey Ham & Cheese Bread was outstanding at dinnertime with a Mexican-themed salad and even better, toasted, at breakfast the next day. I baked my bread in three small loaf pans instead of one large one. This allowed me to more easily determine a serving size (1/4 of a loaf rather than 1/12) and I could freeze the extra loaves intact.

All nutritional information provided here was calculated by Diabetic Foodie using the tools on the nutritiondata.com website.

Makes 12 servings
Per serving (Patricia’s version): 234 calories, 18g fat (6g sat), 73mg cholesterol, 320mg sodium, 11g carb, 0g fiber, 1g sugar, 8g protein
Per serving (DF version): 177 calories, 11g fat (3g sat), 21mg cholesterol, 359mg sodium, 11g carb, 1g fiber, 1g sugar, 9g protein

Disclosure: For my participation in the Four Weeks of Salad as a Meal Challenge, I received a copy of Salad as a Meal by Patricia Wells plus two copies to give away. This post contains at least one affiliate link, which means if you click it and make a purchase, I will receive a tiny fee. Please see my disclosures page for more information.