rollover

This last weekend I finally had my first crack at making bread rolls.

My dad bought me a bread maker for me last birthday and I've pretty much used it constantly since then. However, I haven't been particularly adventurous with it, having stuck basically to standard white/brown loafs.

But the machine itself has loads of different settings that led you make all sorts of different breads. Of these, the one that intrigued me the most was bread rolls.

One of the problems with the loaves is that, without the preservatives and other things they put into supermarket bread, they go stale really quickly. Now stale bread is something I'm not at all keen on, so it means I have to use up the bread quickly, which can restrict my meal options, or throw it away, which is rather wasteful.

My hope is that rolls will last a little longer, or at the very least will be slightly more manageable from a meal-eating point of view. But there were two potential issues that were holding me back from trying.

First off the recipe seemed a bit complicated. Basically, when you make normal, yeast-based bread you have to have two periods of 'proving'. This is when the yeast really does its 'thing', pumping out carbon dioxide that forms the bubbles that make bread the fluffy thing we all love.

With the normal loaves, these proving periods are covered in the machine's program where it just sits and waits, before doing more mixing. For the rolls you use a setting called 'dough' that only has 1 period of mixing and proving.

The idea then is that you hoik the dough out, knead it, chop it into individual rolls that you shape and then leave, covered, to prove a second time.

This sounded rather complicated and prone to error, so I've been afraid to try it. The other issue was that the recipe uses loads of flour - nearly twice as much as the loaves I've been doing - so I was afraid I'd balls it up and use up the flour.

My plan then was to make a normal loaf and then immediately try out the rolls. Given that a normal loaf takes 3 hours and the dough setting takes 1.5 hours, the 2nd proving period takes half an hour and the baking takes at least 15 minutes, you can therefore see why I waited until the weekend!

The final result was... (drum-roll)... actually not all that bad.

I did fuck up the recipe a little. Ironically I realised I didn't put the correct amount of flour in. This had the effect of making the dough very sticky, but with some good old fashioned elbow-grease, I kneaded in the extra dough.

I think the lack of flour also made it rise too much - not enough weight to stop it, if you see what I mean. And I was afraid my error and attempt to correct would have the opposite effect.

But nope, after the 2nd resting, the rolls did indeed inflate, and after baking I tried one out and it was really quite nice.

I left the rest of them and checked them out last night. They'd definitely declined in freshness like the normal loafs, but they seemed better and were still quite soft and moist.

Altogether then, I'd say it was something of a success.