Onion Bialys

When two kitchen ceiling fans are whirling and I am madly swinging one of those big round strainers to help shove the smoke out the window, you know I'm having a fabulous time in Singing Wheat Kitchen. Kosher salt is falling into the stove burner, onions are sweating in the pan and the fire alarm should go off any second, but if nobody sees all this action a la Charlie Chaplin as the baker, then it's not a bad milieu.

If you crank up your oven to 500 degrees, there's a good chance you'll make a roomful of smoke if anything has landed on the bottom of the oven, like tomato sauce or feta cheese that crept over the pizza dough and rolled off the baking stone a while back. These are the incidents that give your kitchen elan.

It was Nell Newman who got me thinking about onion bialys and how she used to get them at Oscar's Deli in Westport. The flavor, the sensation of sweet carmelized onions against the cracked pepper and soft dough, the density of the crumb, sheer heaven.

I had some onions on hand and it looked like snow, so I dug in and started a batch. I used a recipe from the big book "Baking With Julia," but if you don't have that one (and I wish you did), you can check out the online recipe from King Arthur Flour, which is the brand of flour I like to mess with.

I think it cost me a job selling bread at a major fancy market when the head baker did not share my preference. Stuck on tradition if you ask me. That's another story.

If you use the KAF recipe, please don't use dehydrated onions for the top of the bread. Just add about 2 tablespoons of oil to the frying pan, mince at least a cup of fresh onion and then saute it for about 3-5 minutes. There's your topping and it will be better.

You can make great bialys in one day - and notice, I didn't use poppy seeds, owing to not having them on hand and refusing to flee the scene of all that smoke.

Smoke's a flavor enhancer, isn't it?