Mariner's Onion Sandwich Rolls

I learned to hate onions at an early age. When I was about 5 years old, I was victimized by an older, male family member, who thought that it would be funny to give a child a raw onion, saying that it was just a different kind of apple. Being a naïve and trusting child, I accepted the gift of the “different apple”, and took a bite. To put it mildly, I was disappointed, and almost thirty years passed before I would again voluntarily eat anything with onion in it.

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Despite knowing why I felt the way I do about onions, my father couldn’t understand my attitude. He loved onions. In fact one of his favorite dishes was black-eyed peas and rice, completely covered with chopped onion. An entire, medium-sized onion. I could barely stand to be in the same room with it, and his failure to understand my position was the source of much internecine conflict, up until I left home for good.

Sorry folks, I still don’t like raw onion, nor most of the ways onions are prepared; but after I finished graduate school, I did discover that not all onions are the same, and that one need not consume an entire raw, medium-sized, yellow onion in order to derive some flavor benefits.

Once upon a time, there was in Gainesville, Florida, a small but popular hamburger stand called In & Out Hamburgers. It is my belief that this stand was a local “Mom and Pop” operation and not part of the California-born chain with a similar-sounding name. At any rate, when you ordered a burger from them, by default it was dressed with a couple of extremely thin slices of a (very!) sweet, red onion. I came to enjoy those burgers a lot.

Later on, my Honey (who likes cooked onions) introduced me to the Onion Roll, and I found that I could enjoy a sandwich made with same. Over the years, I added fried onion rings and onion straws to the repertoire of allowable onions in my diet, and ultimately, even came to enjoy other fried, fully cooked onion dishes, like the famous “bloomin’ onion” and its imitators.

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Suggested Equipment:

• Mixing bowls, large -2 ea
  
• Spoon or other tool for mixing dough
  
• Skillet, about 10"
  
• Standard "half" cookie sheet (13"×18")
  
• Mise bowls
  
• Cutting board and knife
  
• Basting brush
  
• Common kitchen measures and tools
  

Ingredients:

1. equivalent to 2¼ teaspoons Fleischmann's active dry yeast
   

Item		Amount
Flour	Bread or all-purpose	5	cup
Water	Warm (~105℉)	½	cup
Yeast	Active, dry granules, packet	1	ea1
Onion	Fresh, medium, finely diced	1	ea
Butter		3	Tbs
Salt	Common	1½	tsp
Sugar	White, granulated	¼	cup
Milk	Whole (4% butterfat)	¾	cup
Egg	Fresh, large	1	ea

Directions:

1. Chop the onion finely. Sauté using the skillet, until the onion is lightly caramelized. Remove and reserve about ¼ of the sautéed onion for topping, and reduce the heat applied to the remainder to low or medium-low.

2. Add the yeast, along with the warm water and about ¼ teaspoon of sugar to your mixing bowl. Stir gently then let stand while you prepare the remaining wet ingredients. Wait until it shows some bubbles (usually 5 to 10 minutes) before adding any other ingredients.

3. Add the butter to the skillet, and when it has melted, add the salt, sugar, and finally, the milk. When the mixture starts to simmer, reduce heat to a slow simmer, and cook for an additional five minutes. Remove the skillet from the heat, and allow it to cool until the mixture just a little warmer than skin temperature.

4. After cooling, add the cooked ingredients to the mixing bowl, and stir until ingredients and the yeast are uniformly distributed.

5. Add in 2 cups of flour and stir. Add the remaining flour, ½ to 1 cup at a time and mix after each addition, until you have a soft dough that pulls away from the bowl. Knead the dough until it is smooth, and all the ingredients are uniformly distributed, adding flour only as necessary to absorb excess moisture.

6. After kneading, allow the dough to rise until it has doubled (usually about 1 hour). Punch the dough down and knead it again, thoroughly, then allow it to rise until it has doubled again.

7. Punch the dough down yet again, and turn it out into a large oiled bowl, turning it over in order to coat the dough ball all over with oil. Cover the dough loosely with a cloth and let it rise in a warm place until doubled (about another hour).

8. Grease the "half" cookie sheet to receive the rolls. Punch down the dough a final time and roll it into a fat log. Cut the log into 12 equal pieces. Roll each piece into a ball .

9. Distribute the remaining sautéed onions evenly on a plate or cutting board, and gently roll the dough balls around on them, thinly coating each ball with the caramelized onions. Redistribute the onions as often as needed.

10. Place the balls into the prepared pan, spacing them equally. You should have four rows of three dough balls when you're done. Cover loosely with a cloth and allow to rise a final time, until doubled (about 30 to 45 minutes). At this point, what you have is to be considered uncooked rolls!

11. Beat the egg, and brush the tops of the rolls with the beaten egg. This forms a glaze on the rolls when they cook. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes in a preheated 350° oven, until golden brown.

Originally, the recipe called for baking the rolls in a 9"×13" baking pan - what my mother used to call a "biscuit pan". That is what is shown in the picture. The product tasted as good as it looked, but the shape of the rolls didn't work for use as sandwich rolls: they were too tall and not big enough around. A little experimenting led us to the finding that the "half" cookie sheet produces a roll with the optimum shape.

Now, I have to admit that I cheated. I used our KitchenAid monster stand mixer (7 quart) for most of the mixing and punching down. In fact, for all but the last punchdown. So I admit I'm lazy, but all that means is that I had more time to do other things while I waited for the dough to rise.

I also didn't bother with the dough log. Instead, I weighed the dough as I turned it into the oiled bowl, and when it came time to make the individual doughballs, I pinched lumps off the mass of dough, making sure that each one weighed as near ¹⁄₁₂ of the total weight of the dough as I could manage.

My Honey and I tried one out, not too long after they came from the oven, and they were at least as good as any I've purchased from a grocery-store bakery. Of course, I like to think they're better! We'll probably use a few for sandwiches at supper tonight.

OK. Time to give credit where it's due. Although this recipé is not, in any sense, kosher (I'm not Jewish, after all), and I've made a number of procedural changes in the directions, it was inspired by the one shared by Brynie Greisman at kosher.com.

So there you have it. Home-made Onion Rolls!