Continuing my journey though The Bread Bible, I finally had both the flour and the time to move on to the third recipe, onion rolls. Since the basis of the rolls are the previous French white recipe, which with I've had repeated success, I'm not going to bother explaining that process. If interested, you can see my first attempt at that pain ordinaire here: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/25195/pain-ordinaire-bread-bible

Onion rolls made me so nervous I actually put off baking them for a bit. My trepidation arose from two facts: First, other than Betty Crocker casseroles and slow-cooker stews, I'm not much of a cook at all, so the onion cream really intimidated me. Second, I didn't generally like onion rolls (or so I thought, until I gave this recipe a spin), so I wasn't even really sure what they should look or taste like in the end. I was hoping my husband's penchant for onion bagels would get me through, though of course a bagel isn't a roll, so who knew how helpful that would be. 

In the end, I sucked it up, reminded myself you don't learn by not trying, and plunged in. First, I prepped the onion-cream filling: 

I couldn't help but think that perhaps I was wrong about onion bread--after all, how could anything, especially a bread, made with this much butter and heavy cream possibly be bad tasting? 

But then, my love of butter and cream probably verge on unhealthy...but I digress. 

The butter melted, I poured in the cream, it simmered, I stirred, and so it went. I watch a lot of Food Network and decided that cooking the onions "until clear" was a good place to start. Of course, the clarity was difficult to assess with the cream in there, but I pressed onward nonetheless. 

This is the mixture before I reduced it: 

And this is the mixture reduced (or, at least, what I thought was reduced; by all means, any cooks out there feel free to chime in and offer some tips): 

I should mention that I was, in fact, pleased with the French bread dough: 

While the onion mixture cooled, I made the rolls using a neat trick I got off a Betty Crocker forum:  

(i.e., making squares, then tucing the corners in underneath, pinching the seam, rolling gently a few times for shape, and voila! A roll!). While this trick does work well, I'm still hoping that Santa brings me a food scale this year because getting even dough divisions continues to be difficult and I'm worried on day I'll come across a recipe it really impacts. 

I used kitchen shears to cut an X into the dough, as instructed, and smushed down my fingers in the middle pretty deep. This is where I got concerned--it didn't seem as though there was enough room for 1 tablespoon of onion filling, let alone two. Still, I pressed onward: 

They really did seem rather overstuffed at this point, and I was getting more and more worried. 

Surprisingly, however, by the time they were ready for the oven, I had run out of the filling: In they went, and the results were I think pretty ok.

On the one hand, I learned the importance of letting the "legs" of the roll surround the filling because it really bakes the filling in. The roll portion came out lovely, I must say, but I was kind of disappointed that the onion filling wasn't more integrated into the bread. Ultimately, it seemed more like a topping, but that might be how it's supposed to turn out. The oninons were also very wet and only a little blackened. I notice on onion bagels, the onions on top at least are charred. 

 Still, my hubby and I did eat them pretty quickly, but I'm wondering if I shouldn't bake these again to work on filling technique before moving on to the flatbreads listed next. All feedback welcome! 

I made this lovely rye bread from the Bread Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum this weekend. 

If you like a deli-style rye, this is the bread to try.  It has a fantastic balance of rye flavor and a beautiful crumb that stays fresh-tasting for days.  The crust is just beautiful (never mind my scoring).  And the oven spring on this bread, in my 10 1/2" clay baker

Is truly spectacular!

This bread weighed just shy of 2 lbs (14.9 oz to be exact)--more than I thought my clay baker could even handle. 

But there's a secret.  My "variation" was actually a mistake--a mix up between caraway seeds and anise seeds.  And delicious--I don't like caraway at all, but it was truly yummy with anise.  A good mistake.

I've blogged about it here if anyone is interested. 

Hello, everybody

a couple of weeks ago I made the 'Heart of Wheat" bread - she herself designed the recipe, based on everything she learned while baking a ton of bread for the book.

I had very high expectations for it, but unfortunately it did not work exactly as I hoped. It actually looked quite good, but the crumb was very tight and it had very little oven spring.

when the dough was ready to go in the oven, it was very very airy and bubly - which made me even more excited about getting THE perfect bread. I did what I normally do, "plopped" it out of the basket straight into my clay baker, but, contrary to my hearty sourdoughs (a la Hamelman). that barely deflate during the transfer, this bread pretty much turned into a flat sorry thing.

I was hoping it would have enough oven spring to come back to normal, but it rose very little.

for the experts bakers here - do you think that this particular kind of bread needs to be handled very gently? Would just the transfer affect so much the outcome?

If you want to see the series of photos, they are on my flickr site

http://www.flickr.com/photos/79167445@N00/sets/72157619698058718/

the series of photos shows the method, you make a sponge and then add flour and yeast on top of it, after a few hours the sponge sips through the flour, pretty cool method...

I add here a photo of the final loaf - as i said, looked good, but it was just so-so as far as taste and texture goes.

if anyone has made this particular recipe, I am all ears....

THANKS!

I baked this one today (started it yesterday) and I am impressed. I had never tasted a sandwich loaf so good! I have made rustic breads before but not sandwich loaves because I don't normally eat that type of bread so my husband just buys his from the supermarket (Pepperridge Farm type). I think from now on, there will be no eating supermarket plastic bread in this house! So good!

June

Hi,

Today I prepared English muffins for the first time in my life. Oh, My. God.  So good. Why do people say that English food is bland? These little breads are out of this world!

Is anyone out there familiar with Rose Levy Beranbaum's bread bible process sufficient to make suggested improvements? Specifically, I have four loaves of her Basic Soft White Sandwich Loaf(p.244) in the oven as I write.  They have turned out truly wonderfully, but I have a major problem with the process.  According to the recipe, I need to: