Dilly Onion Bread

[a_boleyn]

About a month ago, I picked up a 20 kg bag of all purpose flour and finally got a chance to do some bread baking. I used two different shaping methods ... the traditional 3 strand braid and the more exotic 'epi' which is supposed to resemble the way that wheat grows on its sheaf which is referred to as an épi de blé. In reality, the epi is simply a

Comments

[a_boleyn]

I'm probably going to combine 3 or 4 recipes that I've seen when I end up making this. I need to come up with a recipe that will give me the proper proportion of fat/pork cracklings to flour, and then use enough water/milk, yeast and sugar to create the dough onto which the ground fat/pork crackling paste can be spread.

I think that the technique is the basic French one for making croissants or puff pastry with cycles of spreading the paste (instead of chilled butter) over the dough, folding, chilling, rolling out (and spreading more fat), folding chilling etc until the paste has been incorporated into the dough to create those multiple layers which puff up because of the fat melting during the baking process.

You don't want the beaten egg brushed on top to fall over the side and glue the layers together so that they can't puff up. That may be why some recipes say to brush the beaten egg on top of the rolled out rectangle and then cutting out the circles before putting them on the baking sheet. You can then push together the funny shaped left over dough between the circles and bake them into "cook's treat". Or cut the biscuits into squares. :)

My mother used yeast as the leavening agent for the dough, though she never had rum in the house so I think you can probably leave it out. :) The Romanian versions I've found also sprinkle whole cumin seeds over the egg washed biscuits before baking them, something else which my mother never did.

Thank you for sharing your recipe. I'll post my final recipe and pictures when done.