Sage and Onion Bread for BYOB (Bake Your Own Bread)

Thank you to my newest follower (#121) for joining my reading group!

News here is – the BYOB (Bake Your Own Bread) sisterhood has accepted me as a participant to bake my own bread for a year. That’s the goal – no store bought breads. That being said, you aren’t actually kicked out if you need to grab a loaf of sandwich bread or frozen biscuits. That’s not an epic fail of the homemade code……..just a minor setback . We all gotta do what we gotta do.

To quote Captain Barbossa, “the code is more what you'd call "guidelines" than actual rules.” So yeah………I think I’m up to the challenge and have been having a ball making bread so far. It’s such a complex thing. Bread. Yeast is living and if you have water too hot – dead. A flat “loaf” of dense hard to eat bread.


Sage and Onion Bread



I used the bread machine to do the kneading and first rising then finished it out on my own. Tricky stuff there as the recipe came from a Better Homes and Gardens Bread Machine cookbook. Therefore, it didn’t have directions on time or temperature to cook.



Ingredients........

1/3 cup finely chopped onion
4 teaspoons margarine or butter
1 cup milk
3 tablespoons water
3 cups bread flour
2 teaspoons sugar
2 teaspoons dried sage or crushed sage
¾ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon active dry yeast or bread machine yeast

In small saucepan cook the onions in hot butter or margarine until tender. Cool slightly. Seriously…cool it or it will cook the yeast before you get started. And how much would that suck?!

For my machine I added the liquids first, then the gently mixed dry ingredients except the yeast. Next I added the onions. Atop all this I placed the teaspoon of yeast. A full minutes later I thought, “Oh no….what if the onions are still too hot. What if they destroy the yeast?. Crap!!”



Set the machine to Dough and let it do the work. I peered inside the bread machine when it had a half hour to go and it just didn’t look like it was rising properly……. so I thought I’d ruined it.

No worries……it came out well and filled my bread pan properly.

As I mentioned before, this recipe is from a bread machine cookbook so I had to guess how long for the second rise and temperature to cook, how long, etc.

I guessed correctly! After the dough cycle was finished I placed it in a bead pan, covered with plastic wrap and let rise another half hour. Baked at 375 F for 25 minutes – perfect! We were so pleased.



Atkins be damned! I’d be a miserable failure on that diet!

Cutting into it the aroma of sage stuffing rises and you’d swear a bowl of Thanksgiving stuffing was sitting before you. We had this with black beans and rice, smoked sausage and beer breaded cheddar cheese balls.



I am participating in BYOB!


Want to join in at BYOB? Check out the link above and enjoy!