homebaked bread

Can I call in at yours for supper I do so love marmite

I use a bread hook on my mixer, too. It's great for wet and rich doughs which are messy to knead. I like to see how the bread dough is behaving throughout the whole process, which a bread maker doesn't allow. I particularly like onion brioche loaf, which is a wet and sticky dough, but very more-ish when it's just out of the oven. Great with soup.

I make mine up, I use a lot of leftovers in bread, leftover gravy instead of water for example, but my favourite with soup is cheese and bacon. I use really strong cheddar and quite a bit of it, and add crunchy cubes of fried bacon. Sometimes fried onions, sometimes dried tomatoes. I tend to buy bran and add it to cheap white strong flour, that way I can vary the strength of the 'wholemeal' more easily and it's cheaper. I find that many recipes are not strong enough, I have to double up on flavours before I can taste them, so I prefer to do my own. Olive and anchovy is good with tomato soup. I dry quite a few things and dried chopped mushroom is rather nice.

Some good ideas there, thanks.
So if you add onions do you always fry them a bit first? I've never added things to the dough other than dried fruit.
I've made chelsea buns a few times, which are delicious, but fiddly to make.
I also made stollen , which has marzipan running through it. You need a firm dough for that.

I soften onions with butter so they become opaque before adding them.

So do I, when. The oul they were cooked in gos into the mix too.

Please can I say, though, that opaque means you can't see through them, transparent means you can, so I don't think you really mean opaque. Sorry, it is one of the things that "gets on my pip".

I'll get my coat and decamp to Pedants' corner.

Oul? Oil!

I mean when the onions change from being hard and white to being soft and what the recipes refer to as opaque, although no, you can't see through them.

Opaque is the correct and commonly-used term for onions that have been fried for a few minutes

The cookery writer in the Times says until they go slimy which sounds revolting but true.

I do mine until they are starting to brown, they are sweeter that way.

I have managed to recreate my grandmother's recipe for tea cakes, it has taken me a few years! I tried out the Hairy Biker's recipe, but it was far too sweet and rich, so I had to work backwards from that. Even with my family, there was a limit to how many times I could try it out on them. There's nothing like a taste and a smell to bring back happy memories.

I bow to all the recipes then! Maybe they are "translucent" ?

My DS, who is a qualified chef, uses the term 'translucent' I suppose it depends on the thickness of the slices. If they are very thin, no doubt you can see through them in which case they would be translucent; if you chop them coarsely, they might remain opaque.

These pedants get everywhere

I just knows wot oi loikes. 'Slightly caramelised'.

Ditto

just goes to show how important onions are.
Maybe start a new thread on onion recipes. Onion confit - yum!

When they definitely should be translucent! No wonder you have been getting indigestion all this time!

Eh? Who's getting indigestion, nellie? Are you thinking of someone else? The softened, finely chopped onions I now regret mentioning go into onion brioche, and aren't even noticeable when the finished bread comes out of the oven - just tastes lovely. It's a bread served in a steak house in Anaheim, California - they gave me the recipe.