Red onion and green olive rolls

[Dan Lepard]

Red onion and green olive rolls

The key to this bread recipe is a curious method bakers once used to keep bread moist. Cooked starch, as simple as flour boiled in water, was found to help keep the crumb extra soft. Perfect for cold roast lamb sandwiches.

50g unsalted butter
200g - 250g red onions, roughly chopped
350ml water
100g - 125g pitted green olives, roughly chopped
2 tsp easy-blend yeast
500g strong white flour
2 level tsp salt
Polenta or cornmeal

Melt the butter in a saucepan, add the onions, and get it sizzling. Stick the lid on, drop the heat and gently cook for 10 minutes until the onions are soft. Remove from the heat, beat in 50g flour then add 350ml cold water and whisk. Bring to the boil, whisking furiously then spoon the mixture into a large mixing bowl, stir in the olives and leave until warm. Beat in the yeast, add the remaining flour and salt, and work to a smooth dough. Cover and leave 10 minutes, then knead on a lightly oiled worktop for about 10 seconds then cover and leave 10 minutes. Repeat this knead-and-rest sequence twice more at 10 minute intervals then leave covered for 30 min. Roll the dough on a floured surface to about 20cm by 25cm, brush with water and sprinkle with polenta. Cut into 9 pieces, lay these spaced apart on 1 or 2 trays lines with paper, cover and leave 1 1/2 hours. Heat the oven to 220C (220C fan-assisted) and bake for 20-25 minutes.

[chefcdp]

Thanks for this. This recipe makes very tasty buns.

I scaled these out a little over 3 Oz and got a dozen buns. They really make a nice sandwich. However, they are so good you can eat them plain, without even butter.

Thanks again,

Charles

[Dan Lepard]

Great It's really good to hear that! Must say I ate most of the batch, stored in a zip-lock bag n the freezer; they make a very good roast lamb sandwich.
Dan

[sakkarin]

Hi Dan (NB, first post here...),

I tried this recipe as I was intrigued by the pre-cooking of the flour, and it was another opportunity to give your 10/10/10 method a try. I was discussing it on the BBC food board, someone suggested having a peek here.

Anyway, here's my piccy of what I ended up with, does this look anything like you intended?



The extremely wet dough I had imagined would end up like a ciabatta, but it was very, very different, a soft, closeish textured bread, with very soft crust (even though it looks crusty in the pic), vaguely like those supermarket panini with fake griddle burns, but very much moister, and moist without being claggy.

These were tasty enough to eat completely on their own, no butter even, just a tasty oniony/olivey savoury snack. Even 2 days later, the remaining rolls are still wonderfully moist and eatable.

I confess that I added a fair amount of flour during the kneading, as the dough was wetter than I could handle (which may have been because I used more onion than intended, and also rinsed the olives, without properly drying...), hence my question as to whether the end result really was what was intended.

[Dan Lepard]

Yes, they look good. And they stay soft for days. The point behind all the recipes is to introduce an old or new technique that we can use in other recipes.

So here you could take this boiled mixture, without the onion or with another flavouring, and add it to all softs of other breads to make them stay softer for longer.

Dan

[sakkarin]

Thanks. I will definitely try further variations on this idea.

Nothing to do with that, I bought some millet flour I spotted the other day on impulse, as it had a roti/chapati recipe on it, which used just 100% millet flour. The only time I've heard of millet being used is in documentaries about kalahari tribesmen (well some tribe or other...) depending on it as their staple diet.

I tried using a standard loaf recipe, and treated it just as ordinary wheat flour.

Very strange stuff, a nasty bitter aftertaste that catches the back of the throat the instant you eat it (and i only tried a few crumbs), but the oddest thing was the smell, which made me gag, even though it wasn't particularly unpleasant: it must have something in it that promotes the gag reflex. I tried it several times, but couldn't inhale without retching.

Maybe it was a reaction with the yeast which created whatever made me gag, and if it is just used with water to make rotis, it is palatable...

Hmm. Must dig out my "On Food and Cooking".

[sakkarin]

Further to previous post on onion bread, re-did the recipe exactly as it is but without onion/olive. End result a good soft bap type roll, which I will use in future. I very slightly overcooked, to crust was a tiny bit too firm.



Flour used: bog standard Tesco Strong White flour, 48p a bag.

[Dan Lepard]

They look very smart, get the perfect bake is hard to judge. You might want to try it with a little wholemeal, maybe 100g + 400g white, and a teaspoonful of malt.
Dan

[Tzinti]

er........Dan, were the onions supposed to come out blue?

Tzinti.

[iLikePie]

^ haha, sounds great tzinti!

Dan, this might be just what i was looking for... I was in Phillipa's today (a chain store that actually makes good bread, including a lot of real sourdough) and as usual eying off their "green olive toscano".
What I love about this bread is that is so soft and at the same time, dense. The crust is almost non-existent, very soft and just a nice loaf in look and taste.

Can't wait to try this one!