Dilly Bread Recipe | Oops Oh Well It’ll Taste Good

I was working off of Mom’s handwritten recipe card for this year’s batch, not my version that spells out all the steps… couldn’t find my own card so had to wing it, until I remembered I’d blogged the full recipe a few years back. Whew.

Her card is just a list of ingredients, very casually grouped together with brackets… and the brackets run from the front to the back of the card. Uh, well, everything is together and has been kneaded lightly and set aside for the first rise; I should have put all the savory ingredients in the double boiler, not mixed the dry ones in with the flour. However, it’s all in place now.

This year, I’m using half “all-purpose” flour, half whole-wheat, and I didn’t bother to cut up and brown fresh onion or add garlic. Double batch again, because I actually like having leftover bread for toast later.

Fortunately, I (more or less) remembered the steps, although I didn’t knead very long, as I’m thinking the whole wheat flour (which has little brown bits of bran, yum) would quickly become tough if I overwork the dough. More pounding will be done in about half an hour for the second rise.

David’s aunt is hosting Thanksgiving again this year, and the whole family will be there except for Dan and Deb and the kids (but Josh and Melissa are in town from their respective digs, and we’ll see them later this weekend). For various reasons this will be an “interesting” Thanksgiving, in the sense I picked up from when David and his folks and I went to see a serious little play called “Copenhagen.” In this context, “interesting” means something like “the frightening unknown.” It’s recently become something of an in-joke with mom-in-law Leah and me.

However, being together with family today will probably be “interesting” in the sense of “what has everybody been up to since we saw each other last year” or “when are the stuffed mushrooms Randi makes coming out???”

Turkey Day Dilly Bread! « Blogula Rasa

1 package dry yeast
1/4 c warm water
1/4 t sugar

1 c. small curd cottage cheese
2 T sugar
1 T instant onion (use 2-3T if using fresh onion)
2 T butter
2 t dill seed
1 t dill weed
1 t salt

1 beaten egg

2 1/2 – 3 c. flour sifted with
1/4 t soda

Start the yeast “working,” using water that is quite warm but not too hot.

Avoiding the fungal debacle from four years ago, I’m again using dry yeast. It’s Red Star, because I couldn’t seem to find Fleischman’s, the brand Mom swore by (and sometimes swore at, if it didn’t “work” right).

It’s okay but seems to be puffing up a little quicker than I’m used to; I went by Mom’s proportions of sugar to yeast, but this may be a bit more active than her brand was years ago. Should be… “interesting.”

Over boiling water in a double boiler, combine cottage cheese, sugar, onion, butter, dill seed, dill weed, and salt until butter is melted. Remove upper pan from heat and stir until comfortably warm. Add the yeast mixture, which should be bubbling up. Caution, too much heat at this stage kills the yeast! Add the beaten egg to the cooled mixture. Start adding the flour to the liquid (or if you prefer, make a well in the flour and pour the liquid into it). Stir until the dough starts to come together and pulls away from the side of the bowl or pan. Turn it out onto a floured surface (breadboard is best) and work the flour into the dough and knead until it starts to smooth out and is slightly elastic. Knead by pushing the dough with the heel of your hand (floured) and then fold the elongated dough over itself, give it a quarter turn, then knead it again.

Put the dough in a buttered or oiled bowl, cover with a clean kitchen towel, and put it somewhere warm to rise until double in size (about 35-40 minutes).

I like to put it somewhere near the gas stove, because the cooktop is always slightly warm from the pilot lights between the burners. Seems to work pretty well with a cookie sheet put down for a stable surface. This is a plastic bowl and I should really be using a classic crockery bowl, but you get the idea. It’s all about incubating that yeast and making it all cozy, but not giving it so much heat and sugar that it goes nuts and invades the kitchen.

Right about now is a good time to clean up the Little Kitchen of Horrors, as the double boiler gets all gunked up if you mix the dough in it rather than pouring it into a well in the flour. Word to the wise…

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Punch down, turn onto board and knead again until smooth. Form a loaf by rolling side to side, pulling the sides of the dough under (if making a double batch, divide the dough in half). Place in a buttered, floured loaf pan and bake at 350 degrees for about 40-50 minutes. Bread is done if it “thunks” hollowly when tapped.

This is the best thing for leftover turkey sandwiches. It’s also really, really good toasted and buttered. And it makes the house smell incredible.

You MUST resist the temptation to open the oven door repeatedly to check on the bread. It’ll get done when it’s good and ready. However, it really DOES smell incredible and so you may be forgiven for occasionally liberating that delicious onion bread smell into the rest of your house. Also, if your oven doesn’t heat evenly, you’ll want to rotate the loaf pan(s) halfway through.

Wow, this is the earliest I’ve ever gotten the bread in the oven, I’m usually running late and stressed out. Not that I really planned ahead better this year, but I definitely got started earlier. If I’d gotten home earlier last night, before we needed to cook dinner, I would have made it then.

Here it is, halfway through the baking, and I can see that it’s got some odd stuff happening along the sides. I probably didn’t knead hard enough, since I was cautious about working the whole-wheat flour too much. I hope this tastes good and has good consistency – it’s always such a crap shoot with the haphazard way I usually pull it together at the last minute. However, it felt right and “slightly elastic” when I was kneading it (if a bit tender and soft), and the dough smelled right. It’s very much a “hands on” kind of recipe, as a double batch calls for around 5 cups of flour, but then you sift more in over the dough and the breadboard as you work it, depending on how “wet” it feels. Floured hands are a must, and I considered wearing gloves but decided that they probably weren’t food-grade. There’s something about the feel of the slightly warm, slightly living dough with floury fingers and palms that tells me more about how it’s coming along than I could get if I were wearing gloves, anyway.

The breadboard is a fancy one that I immediately warped the first year I used it, because I scrubbed it down with too much water and then left it to dry unevenly. It’s flattened a little over the years because I’ve washed it differently and tried to dry it flat with weights. The hand weights behind there in the photos are multi-taskers – they keep the board from sliding back as I knead (there’s also a towel underneath) and then once I’m ready to clean it up, I’ll put the weights on the board in an attempt to flatten it some more.

Mom’s mother or grandmother used to make bread in a wooden bread bowl – can’t remember who ended up with it, but it was a handsome thing that was perfect for working bread, shaped like a small shallow trough, all one piece of something hard (probably maple).

And now the loaves are out of the oven and on the cooling racks, not exactly a classic loaf shape, but more like edible trapezoids. The bread smells great, though, and “thunks” properly. The one on the left is the “home” one and I tried a different way of cutting the top, and also I put the egg wash on it before about a 15 minute rest. The one on the right is the “hero” one and goes with us to dinner all sliced up and arranged (although I’ll probably take both loaves, I’ll likely bring one home uncut). That one, I let rest 15 minutes, cut it and did the egg wash, and then put them both in the oven to bake. I’m debating whether to toast the slices to take, since it’s really at its best toasted. I may do that and then stick the dish with the slices in the family oven for a few minutes before dinner.