Whole Wheat Integrale with Carmelized Onion

Whole Wheat Integrale with Carmelized Onion

I work as a nurse on the palliative care unit of a nearby tertiary care hospital.  At the end of shift a short while ago a patient asked me what I would be doing on my day off.

I told her that I was going home to bake some bread.  "I've been baking my own sourdough bread for some time now," I told her with a shrug.

She smiled and nodded gravely, as if it all made perfect sense now. 

"Ah," she said.  "the staff of life."

This woman is no longer with us.  But I remain haunted by what she said. 

Perhaps it really is this simple: why I am so obsessed with baking bread.  All day long I work with death, I hold the hands of the dying, my arms are around those who are grieving.  When I come home, I breathe deeply, and let it all slip away: thoughts of mortality, fleeting time, the empty question-mark of death, and the endless chasm of loneliness left in the wake of love forever more unrequited -- I surrender it all.

I plunge my hands into the mystery of basic ingredients: grains, water, salt: the lower number elements of the periodic table.  Something here is alive, something here is transformed anew, something here is resurrected.  I awaken again to the mystery of life.


Caramelized Onions
One of my coworkers made some wraps with caramelized onions for a Thanksgiving potluck the other day, and it gave me the idea to try them in a bread.  The Tartine Bread book talks a little bit about caramelizing onions for a brioche hamburger bun dough.  I just wanted to add them to my everyday Tartine Integrale bread.  I had a couple of medium-large onions, but one of them had a significant bad spot, so I ended up with a mere 1 1/2 onions, diced.

They were caramelized over med-low heat in olive oil for about an hour or more, and then I cooled them between some paper-towels for 30 minutes before adding them to the 80% hdrated Tartine 100% whole wheat integrale dough.  I also added a quarter cup each of pumpkin and sunflower seeds.  It was turned q30min for 4 hours, then I plunked it in a basket to proof for a couple of hours.

This was the first time I've used my new Baking stone.  It's been a long time since I used a stone, and I had the oven too hot.  I had preheated to 500 degrees F and forgot to turn it down for the actual baking.  And the one loaf that I did remember to turn it to 450 degrees F, was still a bit overdone at 40 minutes. 

Results
So my crust is a little burnt.  And the loaves are a bit misshapen.

C'est le vie.

Actually, even the darkest bread tastes quite all right.  Maybe it is the onions, or the oil they were caramelized in, combining with the dough: perhaps thereby the Maillard reaction is intensified. The roasted nature of the onions and grains imparts more flavour and scent.  Not a bad bread, for all that.  I will eat the darker loaf, and give the other one to my friends.

Take it and eat: the staff of life.

Notes to Myself

• Try a temperature of 425 degrees F for the same amount of time and see if the loaf improves.  Alternatively, you could pull the bread out of the oven after 35 minutes.
• More steam might be required.  I have been using a hot pan with a glass full of water at the moment the bread is introduced to the oven, but perhaps spritzing water would be a good idea for the first 10-12 minutes too, to keep things very moist.  Others use water-soaked towels in the pan, and I might try that once too (if my wife doesn't mind me destroying yet another towel) 
• Longer proofing for more airy crust.  This is quite all right the way it is, though.

Professional Help for the Exorphin Junkie #1

I get Professional Help for my Addiction - #1

I have been baking bread and blogging about it for about a year now (baking longer than that, but only blogging about it for a year), and I figured it was time I got some professional help.  I took my first ever bread course today at the nearby college.

This bread making course is a rather intensive 2-day course, and our instructor is one of the chefs at the college's Culinary Arts program.  When I say it is intensive, I don't mean that the loaves we made were difficult or time consuming.  No, I just mean that we moved along fairly rapidly, and made a total of 4 different doughs in one solid day of baking.  I didn't have a lot of time for taking pictures.

This course is something my wife and I have done together, on this cold Saturday in February.   We have been looking forward to it for a long time now -- almost like a vacation.  And although I was warned by several people that I probably wouldn't learn anything I didn't already know, I expected to learn quite a bit.  And I wasn't disappointed.

Chef Stephanie has been teaching for eight years, and has had lots of baking experience before that.  Many of the restaurants that she worked in serve Mediterranean meals, and some of her favourite breads are in the Mediterranean style.  That is what we worked on today, for our first lesson.

She handed out some recipes and an apron to each of us, and we began.  I have posted the recipes from day one here, in case anyone else wants to peruse them.  They are volume measurements, not recipes given by weights.  (I may be able to get the weight measurements from her, I'll see).

Chef started us off with a Rosemary Focaccia, which I thought was a great idea because there is virtually no forming of the dough: you just mix the ingredients, get a feel for it, let it bulk ferment, and then press it onto a pan. 

My focaccia

While it is proofing the second time, we were making our second dough, essentially the very same ingredients, only this time we added Sundried Tomato and Chevre (Goat Cheese).  Here, she showed us how to roll up the dough with the cheese inside it.  It is essentially the same as pushing down the dough like we did the focaccia, but instead of proofing it like that, we sprinkled some cheese on the bread and rolled it up like a log.

I got to use a dough hook on a mixer, first time ever: mostly, I do all my kneading by hand

 

My sundried tomato and chevre loaves: before the final proof, and after baking

While that was proofing, and we were baking our focaccia, we made the same loaf using Black Olives and Gorgonzola Cheese.  By now we were getting the hang of it.  This was made exactly the same way as the Sundried Tomato and Chevre loaf.  The interesting thing about these loaves, I thought, was the way she had us brush olive oil on the tops, and score the loaves BEFORE the final proofing.  I had always only ever scored my loaves just prior to putting them in the oven.  For these loaves, this pre-scoring worked well, although I really didn't see any meteoric oven spring on any of my loaves.

My olive and gorgonzola loaves, before proofing and after baking

The final loaf of the day was a Walnut and Caramelized Onion Loaf, which she allowed us to make into a free-form loaf.  I made my dough into a couple of smaller boules, and they retained their shape and didn't sag out over the parchment paper, like some of my whole wheat doughs do.  If you use bread flour, bread is a lot easier to form.

Walnut and Carmelized Onion Loaves

One of the Convection Ovens

I was pleased with the way the surface of these boules turned a nice light chestnut colour in the College's convection ovens.

Almost the entire haul of bread, made between the two of us

My wife and I came home with a lot of bread.  We ripped into my Focaccia on the drive home, and we ate some of the Black Olive and Gorgonzola loaf and the Sundried Tomato and Chevre loaf for supper tonight with a soup, and we froze some.  We'll be delivering some to our moms in the morning.

These loaves squished down a bit on the ride home.  Imagine, we forgot to take some bags with us.  Next time, we won't forget

The breads we made today are easy to make, and they taste good.  They do, however, all use bread flour or all-purpose flour.  My interests, as I have been blogging and baking, have turned almost exclusively to whole grains, but it is good to make other breads once in a while to remind oneself of the possibilities.  I am not sure whether the bread recipes that Chef gave us will translate well to whole grain flours, but I am sure going to give it a try.  (I already have a whole wheat focaccia recipe that turned up recently on the Fresh Loaf blogs by Marie H that I want to experiment with!)

Addendum:
The next day, we cut into the Walnut and Caramelized Onion Loaf.  We both think that this is the best of the loaves we made.  The Onion imparts a nice scent and a surprising amount of sweetness.  The roasted walnuts provide texture and colour (they leave the white bread stained a bit purple -- the digital photos here don't quite deliver that colouration, unfortunately), as well as an interesting taste.  This is a nice bread, almost like a desert bread, it is so sweet.  You can't eat this all the time, it is far too starchy.  But it is nice as a treat.

I am thinking that a whole wheat version of this might work, too.

Best of the Four Breads: Walnut and Caramelized Onion Loaf

Notes to Myself

• Get the weight measurements for these recipes, and then see if it will translate to whole grains.
• What is the advantage of scoring prior to the final proofing, vs scoring just before putting the bread in the oven?  It is possible that the late scoring will deflate the dough somewhat.  It is possible though, that you won't get as high an oven-spring if you score it too early.  Hmm.