bread, glorious bread.

[kaigou]

HONEY ROLLS

My family's been making this recipe since before I was born, and it is absolutely the best bread, even if it's got some crazy steps you don't normally see in yeast bread. Mom says, "Delicious hot or cold; good keeping qualities because of the honey." The addition of honey sweetens it just enough that you don't even need to put butter on it, let alone jam -- just eat it plain, if you want.

The recipe calls for bread flour but I've always made it with just regular enriched bleached flour, the usual all-purpose kind, and it's worked just fine.

1 C. sweet/whole milk
1/4 C. warm water
1/4 C. butter
1 tsp salt
1/3 C. honey
5 C. flour
1 cake yeast
2 large eggs

Pour milk into pan, and heat until it scalds. Stir in the butter and honey, and keep stirring slowly until the butter melts. Cool until only lukewarm (if you can hold your finger in the liquid and slowly count to ten without pain, then it has cooled down enough not to kill the live yeast).

humidity note: if you're in low-humid area -- and I mean like 0% to 30% humidity -- you may want to cut the honey down to 1/4 cup instead. If the dough's not wet enough thanks to dry air, too much sugar can make the bread collapse. Bad! Or use the same amt of honey but just be prepared to keep an eye on things.

also: when I get impatient, I pour everything out of the hot pan & into a fresh bowl, then set it in the fridge, stirring every five to ten minutes, and testing it. if you're REALLY impatient, use the freezer -- you just have to be careful not to let the temp drop too low or the yeast won't be happy.

Dissolve the yeast in the warm water to proof it. If you're in Texas or points west and/or the humidity is below about 30%, just add the yeast straight into the honey/milk/butter mix, and leave the water out. This will help adjust for the lower humidity levels in flour & general environment. When yeasties are bubbling happily, add to the cooled milk mixture (or wait until cooled milk is bubbling with yeast added directly).

Add the salt and 2 cups of the flour.

Blend in the eggs.

Blend more flour to make a soft dough.

note: this may be the other 3 cups of flour... and might not be. basically, add the first two cups slowly, and see how the dough looks. should be still a bit sticky, and just starting to ball. if it's too sticky, add more flour very slowly until you get the start of balling going on. that way, when you knead it in flour, you won't be drying it out with too much flour on top.

this dough likes to be just a little bit on the wet side. If you're in the south west or the lower half of the west coast, add just one cup & then slowly add the rest -- if it's really dry on baking day, you'll need a lot less flour, like up to 15% less.

Knead lightly until smooth.

kneading out of the bowl: spread the dough out on floured board, using fingers & heel of hand to spread it to as thin as you can. Fold over, smoosh down & flatten out, fold over, repeat, repeat. The more times you fold over and spread out, the better the dough's gonna rise. No, I don't know the exact reason, though I'm sure there's one. But it does work!

Place in an oiled bowl (canola oil is good) and cover it with the oil to prevent drying.

Fill a pan with warm-hot tap water, and put the pan in the bottom rack of the oven. Then put the bowl on the next rack up and turn the oven light on. Let the bread rise until doubled.

If you're using enriched flour (which is what most people who aren't crazy about organics or special flour kinds use) then it's going to take a little longer, like 45min to an hour, maybe.

When the dough's risen, take out of the oven and slide the (now-oiled) dough onto a clean surface -- I actually just use a plastic cutting board, face-down & don't bother with flour. (This isn't something for which you want a chilly surface, and if it's winter, even less so.) Squeeze and punch until the dough's mostly beaten down, and then have at it again with the fold-and-spread-and-fold for fifteen times or whatever.

Oil it again if you need to, refill the oven-pan with warm water, and stick it back in the oven to let it rise again. No, you don't have to do this, but it does make a difference. Boy, does it!

When it's risen a second time, take the dough out, knead it down again, and stretch it out roughly into a long log-shape if you're doing rolls. Then use a knife to cut (don't tear! cut! trust me on this!) off pieces that are a little larger than golf balls -- about the size of those stress-relieving squeeze thingies, actually. If you're doing several small loaves, cut the dough into equal parts. If the dough's uneven, cut a bit from one to add to the other lumps, and so on. Then shape into rolls and put into small pans.

Place on a greased cookie sheet or in a jelly-roll pan.

Cover and let rise again while the oven's pre-heating.

tip: If your kitchen is really dry and/or really cold (and worst of all, BOTH), then the trick I always do is to take the oven-pan out of the oven and fill it about an inch deep with the hottest water from the tap. Use some kitchen utensils to create bases for the baking pans -- this is where the chinese spoons come in handy. Set the pans on the makeshift rests so the bottoms aren't actually in the water. Then get a kitchen towel soaked with hottest water you can manage, wring it out, and drape it over the entire thing. Bread will rise in relative yeast-happy warmth, and when it goes in the oven it'll rise the rest of the way in the process.

If you're doing rolls on a cookie pan, this might not work unless you've got a deep pan that's bigger than your cookie pan, which I personally don't, and I'm willing to bet isn't that common. That means you'll be soaking that hot towel and draping it over... and then checking it again in 5min to do it again because the towel will cool off that fast if your kitchen's anywhere below about 70F or so.

Bake in a 400-degree oven for 20 minutes, or until lightly browned & have slight hollow sound when you thump the bottom. Do not let them burn! If doing smallish loaves, it'll possibly be more like 25min. If doing one big loaf, go to 25min and then check every few minutes to see how it's coming along in terms of browning. The honey will make the crust brown very nicely, btw.

Always do one more small loaf than you'll need, because you must have sacrificial loaf for TESTING. Rolls, sure, you can test half a pan and no one *cough* will notice. Loaves, it's harder to cut into to make sure, and then give it away afterwards. Just an idea.

If you're making king cake, add a pecan for the baby jeezi in the last go-round of kneading. Sure, you can use the little plastic baby jeezi, but after the 12th night party my mother threw when I was a kid, and the loaf was handed around and finished off and the adults realized that no one had said they'd found the jeezi, they all realized it meant someone had SWALLOWED the plastic toy. Brilliant, people! Although it was rather distressing when my mom overnighted (wah!) king cake to us this year, and I heard CP saying, "the pecan? that's the baby jesus? because I think I just bit off its head." Okay, so plastic does have its good points.

(recipe adapted from: Dolores Casella, A World of Breads. New York: David White Company, 1966. Page 97.)

btw: I don't actually know for certain how long it could keep. It's never last more than three days in MY house, and that's only when the household's two-legged rats are exerting major major amounts of self-control.

Comments

[queenoftheskies.livejournal.com]

YUMMY!

[trembling-aspen.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I've printed it out. :-)

Delilah