Olive-Onion Boule

Our 17th century kitchen doesn’t have an open hearth with a spit for roasting venison, but still, it feels like it could have.  There is a cubby hole in one wall that clearly used to be an oven with a fire underneath.  Now, it hides recycling containers and a rubbish bin.  Next to it is a black working stove with wood stored beside it, but when I’m working in the kitchen it is rarely necessary to light the fire; heat from cooking is enough.  The floor is stone, and some of the walls.  This kitchen is the reason I’ve taken up baking sourdough bread, pies, and cakes. Addison_rd_to_shere_to_raleigh_and_calif

My kitchen opens itself to me, invites me to fill it with the comforting aromas of baking .  I’ve never liked baking before.  It smacked of the victim/housewife I feared to be in the 70’s, the one I threw out of my active life, and the one I’ve longed to reunite with ever since.  Not as a victim, of course.  I don’t want her back.  That’s what was confusing, back then.  How to take charge of our lives, make choices for ourselves, stand up and be counted.

I didn’t know then how to separate the two, the traditional dependent housewife and the positive nurturing woman.   So I threw them both out.  I have been faltering without that nurturing self ever since. Slowly, piece by piece, I’ve been recovering her.  Now, I allow my kitchen to envelop me in a circle of wholeness. Addison_rd_to_shere_to_raleigh_and_calif_1

I’m still experimenting, of course.  Some of my bread is too hard, or too dense, or too brown.  I write down what I have done and try to do better next time.  That’s what I do in my life, too. 

This one is the second most successful bread I’ve made.  The crust is just thick enough and crunchy, the crumb tender, the loaf full of large holes.  Delicious.   I used some home-made leaven* and a little fresh yeast for an extra boost, because I’m afraid I added too much water to the starter which I began in November and slowed it down too much.   Its aroma is still sour and yeasty, but the  consistency is thin.
I then chopped pungent white onions into small dice, threw a handful into a pan of milk, heated it to boiling, then let it cool. 

Meantime, I pitted (!) –  yes, I couldn’t find pre-pitted olives that were tasty – and chopped some herbed black olives, mixed 3 flours –  white bread, whole wheat, and spelt with some sea salt. 

When the milk was cool, I added it to the yeast and leaven and poured it onto the flour, then added the drained onions and chopped olives.   I’m experimenting with a kneading technique from a book called The Handmade Loaf by Dan Lepard  which seems to produce a more rustic bread, but it is pretty sticky and messy.  Anything goes in the pursuit of the perfect loaf, though, from a motley collection of starter containers in the frig to batter-laden fingers and hard-to-clean containers.

The result was a big crusty loaf bristling with chunks of olive.  It was far more than we two could eat before it became stale, so I cut it in half and gave some to our next door neighbors, neighbors who brought us soup when we were both sick. 
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*I made the starter with a recipe in The JOY OF COOKING.  It worked perfectly.  Just white flour and water and time. 

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