Cheese Sandwiches With Pickled Onions.

Not the most artistic blip, but it's relevant to this evening.
Tonight is the AGM of the "West Linton Beekeepers' Association". All of our meetings are followed by a "pot luck" tea, others bring cakes or biscuits but I hanker after something more savoury. It has now become a tradition that I make cheese sandwiches from bread fresh out of the bread machine (it's my own recipe) and take them and the home-made pickled onions. The tradition has gone on for so long that the now grown up children of our president know me as "Pickled Onion Dave"; my fame has spread throughout the south east of Scotland beekeeping world and visitors to our meetings will complain if these delicacies(?) are missing.
You will notice that, since the bread is very fresh, the slicing is not exactly what you would call gentile, but then I never have been noted for subtlety.

It is a sad indictment of modern society that if you Google "pickled onion recipe", you find recipes for cooking onions in vinegar but no mention of a pickling process. The true pickled onion is brined to extract water, and then soaked in vinegar which they absorb to replace the lost water, the preserving is due to the high acid content. Commercial products are preserved by heat and bottling in a sealed jar; as in the Googled recipes, break the seal and they go "off" and worse, both the flavour and the texture are wrong.

I also have problems with bread making, the books say that the process needs salt; I know it's supposed to control the yeast action but, when I first started baking I could find no difference between home-made breads made with or without salt, so I don't use it. On one of those recent baking competitions on the box, a judge sliced a fresh loaf in half, looked at it and said that the baker had forgotten the salt and rejected the loaf out of hand; there was no mention of what he saw that made him draw this conclusion, I would dearly like to know.