So, I made a big pot of caramelized onions the other day, and wanted to try various recipes. I was also inspired by a discussion we had about using beer in sourdough. So that serendipity of events led to a bake of Hamelman's Beer bread with added caramelized onions!
This is a popular flavor I do for our local farmers market. The loaves are packed with pimento cheese (that a friend makes,) and topped with a dutch crunch that uses corn grits instead of rice flour. These things are dang tasty. Please excuse formatting, the formulas are cut and pasted from my recipe spreadsheet.
Grits Dutch Crunch Recipe (prepare the day before)
This has got to be the absolutely best way to caramelize a bunch of onions (in this case, about 8 largish ones). Last night I sliced them all with the mandoline (still made me cry), filled up my crock pot and tossed them by hand with a few tablespoons of olive oil and a bit of salt.
They cooked overnight (about 10 hours) on low, then a couple more hours with the lid partly off to cook down the liquid. I'll now freeze them in 100 gram batches for use in all kinds of things!
I used recipe for Challah from Hamelman's book "Bread" for preparing the dough. The only difference was that I used milk instead of water. The dough is on stiiff side so it is relatively easy to work with it.
I have been practicing for several months the scoring and this one seems to have worked. This is a 80% bread flour , 20% spelt flour with 75% hydration.
Another version of decorative bread scoring with zebra pattern, this time on a 100% semola rimacinata loaf with 70% hydration and 15% inoculation, cold retarded for about 10 hours only.
My oldest grandson is a big fan of "Pane di Altamura", so I like to bake the bread from semola rimacinata to make him happy. Actually I got only semola flour so I used my home mill to re-mill it twice and get rimacinata flour.
This bread was inspired by some post on Facebook some time ago. Since the "Eclipse Challenge" I never used the charcoal colour in the bread and therefore I thought that it's time to practice a bit with decorative scoring.
Basically the same process as the last bake. So little hands on that it is amazing to see what the dough becomes with just time and two s and f's. The one thing I will change is I won't be doing a bulk ferment any longer. I remember why I hate having to wait around for the dough to get warmed up and risen before baking. I will shape and retard in the banneton. I like baking the cold dough as it is so easy to get out of the banneton. Other than that I won't change any of the technique . It all went flawlessly.
Been away a few weeks 'cheating' with a few hybrid loaves, Hamelman and Forkish's books are full of sourdough recipes with a pinch of commercial yeast. It feels a bit wrong... But tastes so right! It's like playing pool after playing snooker, still great fun but seems too easy.
