Focaccia with onion and rosemary

My week was brightened no end yesterday when I discovered that Jean-Christophe Novelli was linking to one of the recipes on Gastronomy Domine. I'm cooking a lot of things like the aubergine caviar he mentions at the moment - it must be the weather. To make the most of the short English summer, it's lovely to eat a cold al fresco supper with some good, home-made bread. This explains the bread-making binge I appear to be on at this week. Fresh bread tastes great, it makes the house smell fantastic, and there is something strangely soothing about pummelling the hell out of a wodge of dough as you knead it; not to mention the lovely feeling you get from poking your fingers into a baby-soft, freshly-risen batch to knock it down. Bread dough is deliciously tactile, but I shrink from describing the full puffy, silky, stretchy glory of it in case you all decide I'm some sort of dough pervert.

Focaccia is an Italian bread enriched with plenty of olive oil. The oil in the dough makes it a dream to work with, and although it has a long rising time to help it develop its lovely open texture, all you have to do is knead, then wait for the dough to rise a couple of times. I've flavoured this focaccia with rosemary and chillies stirred into the dough itself, and a caramelised onion topping slathered on top. It's lovely cut into squares and served with some Mediterranean-style cold nibbles like caponata, aubergine caviar, hummus or panzanella, and a bowl of olive oil and balsamic vinegar to dip into.

To make one focaccia you'll need:

Bread
500g strong white bread flour
1 packet instant yeast
275ml tepid water
1 teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons olive oil (plus extra for oiling bowl and dough)
5 tablespoons chopped fresh rosemary
2 teaspoons Italian chilli flakes

Caramelised onion topping
2 large onions
3 tablespoons olive oil
A few sprigs of rosemary to decorate
12 olives
Olive oil to drizzle and salt to sprinkle over

Put 250g of the flour in a large mixing bowl with the yeast, chopped rosemary and chillies, then pour in the tepid water - this should be around blood heat - and the olive oil. Beat with a wooden spoon until the mixture is smooth, then start to stir in the remaining flour, a handful at a time, until you have a soft dough. The dough should not be completely dry - a little stickiness is fine, and should have vanished by the time you have finished kneading because of the magical development of the gluten in the wheat. You may not find you need to add all the flour - the amount you use will depend on the flour you have bought and the humidity and temperature of your kitchen. (I had about 20g left to put back in the bag when I was done.) Knead the dough vigorously for at least ten minutes, until it is very smooth and stretchy. Oil the dough ball and put it inside an oiled mixing bowl, cover with a damp cloth and leave to rise for two hours in a warm place.

The dough should have more than doubled in size. Knock it down to its original size and knead again for five minutes, then spread it out in a baking tin (mine was 25cm x 35cm), making sure the dough is even and pushed well into the edges and corners. Cover with the damp cloth again and let the focaccia rise for 45 minutes, then push the dough flat again and let it rise for a further 45 minutes while you heat the oven to 220° C (425° F) and prepare the onions by sautéing them in the oil over a low heat until they are sweet and golden (about 20 minutes), then putting them aside to cool.

Push 12 olives into the surface of the risen focaccia in a pattern with some rosemary sprigs, and spread the onions gently over the top (don't push too hard when you spread, so the bread does not deflate). Pour over some more olive oil to fill the olive holes, sprinkle with coarse-grained salt and bake for 20-25 minutes until golden on top, then place on a rack to cool.

Onion rings

If the way to a man's heart is through his stomach, these things are gastronomic Viagra. These onion rings have sweet, tender middles and a fantastically crisp coating. I use a tiny amount of parmesan cheese in the breading, which doesn't give the onion rings a cheesy taste, but does make them deeply savoury and helps create the excellent colour. Cornmeal (rough polenta) gives them a wonderful crunch, and rice flour a pleasing crispiness.

Rice flour is a useful ingredient to keep in the kitchen. It's usually available in Indian and Chinese grocers, and it has one very useful property - coatings made with it stay crisp even after the food has cooled. This makes it invaluable for summer picnics, when you can make breaded chicken, cool it on a rack, pop it in some Tupperware, drag it in a knapsack over miles of public footpath and take it out hours later, still crispy. These onion rings were never going to get the chance to go cold, but they do benefit from the delicate crisp you get from rice flour.

I always use a wok and a jam thermometer for deep frying; this way, you get through much less oil, and can easily control the temperature. When we finally get around to remodelling the kitchen and I have a bit more room to play with, I may end up buying a machine for deep frying; but deep frying is a cooking method I only use about five times a year, so I'm not completely convinced it's worth the money and the counter space.

You'll probably have some breading mixture left over. Just pop it in a bag and freeze it - you'll find you can use it directly from the freezer on another occasion.

To make onion rings to serve four (or fewer, depending on greed), you'll need:

2 large onions (buy the biggest ones you can find)
5 heaped tablespoons cornmeal (coarse polenta)
5 heaped tablespoons rice flour
3 tablespoons finely grated parmesan cheese
1 teaspoon Madras curry powder
1 teaspoon salt
Milk to soak
Flavourless oil to deep fry

Slice the onions into thin rings (about half a centimetre thick). Set the oil to heat. Mix the cornmeal, rice flour, parmesan, curry powder and salt in a large bowl.

Separate the rings out. Dip each ring first into the milk, then dredge them in the breading mixture. Drop the rings into the hot oil (your thermometer should have a 'deep fry' marking on it - otherwise, use a machine) in small batches, and fry for about two minutes, until golden brown. Remove to a tray lined with kitchen paper in a single layer, and keep the tray warm in a very, very low oven while you cook the rest of the rings.

I served these with a steak (on which I'd used Paul Prudhomme's Magic Blackened Steak blend - a hearty recommendation here if you can get hold of some) and mashed potatoes.

Parmesan, tomato and onion bread

When I was a little girl, there was a bakery in our town which made a cheese and onion bread. It was never quite right - the cheese was too mild, there wasn't enough onion, and it needed very salty butter. All the same, I used to really look forward to eating it, preferably sliced with plenty of cheese and tomatoes layered on top, then baked in the Aga by my Dad.

This week, I decided to try to make my own cheesy, oniony bread, this time with my Dad's tomatoes baked into it. I used lots of parmesan, a nice big onion and some flavourful sun-dried tomatoes (along with a little of their oil). The results were great - no extra cheese, tomatoes or toasting required. To make one loaf, you'll need:

210 ml tepid water
1 level teaspoon caster sugar
1 packet easy-blend yeast
350g strong white flour
1 teaspoon fine salt
100g finely grated parmesan
1 ½ teaspoons dried oregano
1 minced clove garlic
1 large onion, sliced finely
5 sun-dried tomatoes in oil, chopped small
1 ½ tablespoons of the tomato oil
½ tablespoon fleur de sel or other coarse salt to sprinkle
Extra parmesan to sprinkle

Mix all the ingredients (except the tepid water and the salt and parmesan to sprinkle on at the end) in a large, warm bowl. Pour in the tepid water and mix well with a wooden spoon until the dough comes together. Transfer to a floured board and knead hard for ten minutes, until the dough is stretchy, glossy and no longer sticky. The onion pieces will snap as you knead, but don't worry about them.

When the dough is kneaded, put it back in the bowl and cover with some oiled cling film. Leave in a warm (not hot) place for about 40 minutes, until it has doubled in size. (The dough will take a couple of hours to rise at room temperature if you don't have a warm place to keep it.)

Take the dough from the bowl and knock it back down to its original size, kneading again for five minutes. If you want a traditional loaf shape, put it in a loaf tin. I decided to make a low, flattish bread in order to make the most of the lovely crust with its sweet caramelised onions poking through, so I shaped the dough on a non-stick baking sheet.

Sprinkle the bread with the salt and extra cheese, and leave to rise again, covered, for 40 minutes in a warm place. Meanwhile, heat the oven to 230° C (450° F).

When the dough has risen, place a large baking tray full of water at the bottom of the oven, and the tray with the bread on a rack in the middle of the oven. Bake the loaf for between 30 and 40 minutes. It will be ready when it sounds hollow when you tap the bottom. Serve with plenty of butter.

Pissaladiere - French onion tart

We're going to the Côte d'Azur later in September, where we've rented a big manor house with a gaggle of friends. I'm looking forward to the cooking - I've missed French market and supermarket produce since Dr Weasel and I left Paris to live in the UK again a few years ago.

I thought I'd cook some Provencale recipes before we leave, just so I feel properly prepared. There is nothing more Provencale than Pissaladiere.

Pissaladiere is a delicious, sharply savoury little tart made from crisp puff pastry, onions cooked until they are sweet and glossy, anchovies and olives. A traditional Pissaladiere would use a preserved fish paste called pissala rather than the anchovies. I did not have an empty Kilner jar and a few pounds of tiny salted fish, so this little tart employs some very delicious Provencale anchovies I found in Waitrose, marinaded in garlic and herbs.

To serve one person (double the recipe to serve two, but I shall be posting another tart for the other half of the puff pastry tomorrow which you might want to serve alongside this), you'll need:

3 onions
½ sheet puff pastry from the supermarket chiller cabinet
1 large knob butter
1 teaspoon fresh thyme
Anchovies to taste
15 olives (preserved in oil, not salt)
10 salted capers, rinsed

Slice the onions thinly and saute them in the butter over a low heat until they release their sugar and turn golden and sweet (about half an hour). Don't salt them; you'll get all the salt you need from the other toppings.

Use a sharp knife to cut the rectangle of pastry in half. Set one half aside for tomorrow's recipe. With the knife, score a line a centimetre from each edge of the pastry rectangle, so you end up with a smaller rectangle drawn inside it. The centimetre at the edges will be the puffy sides of the tart. Use a fork to make little holes in the inner rectangle. This will stop the part of the tart with the filling from rising.

Spread the soft, golden onions inside the inner rectangle. Lay the anchovies in a diamond pattern over them (you can slice them in half lengthways and use fewer for a less strong flavour; these particular anchovies were quite mild and mellow, so I left the fillets whole) and scatter over the thyme, capers and olives. I used a mixture of black, purple and green olives. Bake in a tray on a sheet of greaseproof paper at 200° C for 20-25 minutes, until the edges are golden and puffy, and the base is crisp.

This tart is delicious hot or cold. Try having one cold at a picnic, or making tiny Pissaladieres for a starter when you have a dinner party.

Rösti with bacon and onion

You'll read some tremendously complicated recipes for rosti, involving time-consuming methods like par-boiling and cooling before you grate, quick spells in the freezer, wrapping the grated potato in a tea towel and whirling it around your head in the garden, and so on. There's none of that in this recipe, which is extremely easy.

There's some dispute surrounding the boiling issue - it's true that a par-boiled potato will make your rösti absorb sauces a little better. I've tried both methods and have found the difference to be minute. The raw potato method is faster and results in a deliciously crisp surface, giving to the pressure of your teeth like a thin layer of ice. The potato inside is soft and yielding - delicious.

Ashkenazi Jewish latkes are a similar kind of potato cake (without bacon, for obvious reasons). Recipes for latkes and other Hannukah foods abound in Evelyn Rose's books - I've just managed to find a second-hand copy of the Entertaining Cookbook at an online bookstore for a quarter of the shudder-inducing price I'd been quoted elsewhere, so look forward to some recipes from it when it finally makes its tortured way through the Royal Mail.

I used Kestrel potatoes for these rösti. Kestrel are easy to grow in the garden, and have an excellent flavour. Be careful that whichever variety of potato you choose is a waxy-fleshed one. Don't be alarmed by the amount of starchy liquid that comes out of your squeezed potato - you will get more than a mugful from 500g.

To serve four as an accompaniment, you'll need:

500g Kestrel potatoes, peeled
4 rashers of bacon, chopped finely
1 small onion
3 tablespoons goose or duck fat (you can use any cooking fat with a good flavour, but goose or duck fat does create a particularly crisp surface. Bacon fat would be excellent in this, as would schmaltz.)
Salt and pepper

Grate the potatoes and onion finely. You can do this by hand, or in a food processor with a grating blade. Squeeze the grated potato and onion out, handful by handful, into a bowl and discard the juices. Mix in a large bowl with the bacon, and season.

Melt half the goose fat in a large, non-stick frying pan over a high flame, and add the grated mixture when the fat is sizzling hot. Pack the potatoes down into the pan firmly to create a dense cake, and turn the hob down to a medium heat for 20 minutes.

After 20 minutes, you'll notice a change in the shreds of potato on the surface, which will now be transluscent and glossy. Take a large dinner plate and, using oven gloves, place it upside down on top of the frying pan. Turn the pan and plate arrangement upside down, so the rösti is neatly turned out onto the plate. Melt the rest of the fat in the pan, slide the rösti back in (the cooked side will be facing you) and leave for another 20 minutes.

This was delicious with a roast chicken, soaking up the buttery juices beautifully. Experiment with your rösti - try adding a grated apple, cheese, or fresh herbs. If there are only two of you, try making this larger amount and eat the remainder cold for lunch the next day.

French onion soup

A friend of mine is visiting New York for work at the moment. I received an anguished message from him about a French onion soup he experienced at the Crowne Plaza off Times Square. I quote him in full, because it made me laugh.

'The soup itself is quite nice, but is plugged by a solid lump of melted cheese that is about the diameter of a Camembert, and an inch think. We're talking essentially an entire Camembert's worth of American plastic cheese. I don't mind a delicate top to the bowl, but you could have taken this out, chilled it, and made plastic cheese sandwiches for a hungry family of six.'

Poor him. (I am keeping him anonymous so he doesn't get any death threats from Americans fond of plastic cheese.) French onion soup isn't really that hard to get right, but not many restaurants seem to bother trying; the very worst I've ever had was, shamefully, in Les Halles, the old market district in Paris. Les Halles is meant to be the birthplace of French onion soup, and Le Pied au Cochon is meant to be a restaurant which specialises in the stuff. Ha. It's rubbish. The stock's insipid, the rubbery onions haven't been left to caramelise, and there's no booze in sight. The cheesey bread lid is mostly bread, and the whole leaves you with the sort of hurt feeling you get when someone you trusted has stolen your teddy bear and sold it to buy drugs. Avoid.

The cheese you use here is important, but you do have a choice open to you. You can do it the Les Halles way and use Camembert on your giant crouton, which is delicious and, when stirred into the soup, makes it creamy and cheesey and gloopy and glorious.

I consider we've been overdoing the soft washed-rind French cheese thing recently (I have discovered a local source of Epoisse, and that Tartiflette the other week had enough Camembert in it to keep your arteries busy for a good six months). So I went the other way with our croutons, and topped them with sweet, stringy Gruyere (actually Swiss, but who's checking?). Gruyere has a special affinity for the sweetly Madeira-caramelised onions in this soup; try it instead of Camembert some time and see what you think.

To serve six as a starter or four as a main course, you'll need:

3lb onions, sliced
1 small wineglass Madeira
2½ pints good beef stock or good consommé
Open-textured white bread (ciabatta or a French loaf) - 2 slices per person
1 slice Gruyere per piece of bread
3oz butter
Salt and pepper

Put the onions in a large, heavy saucepan with the butter, and simmer, stirring every twenty minutes or so, for longer than you think you should. You're aiming to cook these to a golden, caramel unctuousness. I didn't use a kitchen timer; I put the DVD of Ziegfeld Girl on and sang along with Judy, running to the kitchen occasionally to stir, until Lana Turner did her tragic thing with the stairs and the chaise longue at the end. (Those who are not Judy Garland fans can just set their timers for 132 minutes, but you're missing a treat.) The onions will have cooked down to a fraction of their original volume.

When your onions are done and you have spent a quiet five minutes being surprised at how Hedy Lamarr was able to look fantastic walking down stairs with fruit on her head and invent spread-spectrum communications without turning a hair, throw the Marsala into the hot pan with the onions and let it simmer away to nothing. Add the stock or consommé, turn the heat right down and bring slowly to a simmer again.

While the soup is coming up to temperature, prepare the croutons. Toast thick slices of bread (I used a grill pan to get good dark, charred lines on each slice), lay the cheese on them and put them under the grill until the cheese starts to brown.

Serve the soup with a crouton floating on top. The soup should soak into the crisp crouton, its heat softening the cheese. Slurp the lot quickly while it's still deliciously hot.