Another birthday dinner celebration occurred this weekend that I wasn't able to attend, although I know it was a fun one for a friend of mine, and so I also feel compelled to say Happy Birthday R.D.!
Today, while watching football and trying to get a little down time in before the start of a new work week, I'm giving my very best effort with making homemade dinner rolls. My Grandma Coleman has traditionally made these at family get-togethers and the rolls are just amazing with golden crunchy tops and light, fluffy, delicate insides that just melt in your mouth. That's how she makes them. Now, how I make them has yet to be seen at the point that I'm writing this, but I have high hopes. I'm following my recipe very carefully, as I do tend to have a fear of failure when it comes to the use of yeast baking.
So, working backwards, here's what I ended up with:
Yes, there is one missing. :) And, yes, they taste exactly what they look like: Biscuits.
The recipe is one that came from allrecipes.com. The original recipe used a bread machine, so if you have a bread machine and want to follow that recipe, here is the link to that one: Allrecipes Sweet Dinner Rolls using a bread machine. I followed the recipe using my mixer. Here's what I did.
First, I heated 1 cup of 2% milk in the microwave for about 1 1/2 minutes. The original recipe calls for 1/2 cup warm water and 1/2 cup of milk, but I only had 2% milk, so I just used it to make the whole cup without adding water. (Okay, so here I go messing with the recipe that I'm supposedly following extremely carefully, right?)
I then put in my mixer bowl and combined it with a wooden spoon with 1/3 cup of sugar until the sugar dissolved. I then added 1 packet of quick rise yeast and stirred that into the mix and then let it sit undisturbed for about 15 minutes. It gets a little foamy and gelatinous. This is what it looked like:
I then added 1 tsp salt, 1 egg and 1/3 cup of softened butter to the yeast mixture, stirring again with a wooden spoon. (Honestly, I don't know if the wooden spoon business matters or not, I'm just telling you what I did in case it does.)
I attached the dough hook to my mixer and added 3 and 3/4 cup of all purpose flour to the mix, 1/4 of a cup at a time. Once the dough was well combined, I formed it into a ball in the bowl like so
and then covered it with a kitchen towel and left it in a warm location to rise for about an hour to and hour and a half. As a side note, to create this warm location, I heated the oven and then placed the covered bowl on the stove top, which gets slightly warm when the oven is on, and then turned the oven off.
After letting the dough rise to about double of what it started as, I "punched it down" and then cut the dough into 12 pieces that I formed into very rustic balls and placed inside a 9x13 greased baking dish.
Now, according to the original recipe, you can do a lot of things with this dough. For instance, instead of forming into balls for rolls, you can opt to roll it out on a lightly floured surface into a circle and cut into wedges to roll up and make crescent rolls; you can roll out, cover with butter, cinnamon-sugar, nuts, and raisins, roll up and cut into cinnamon rolls; you can cut and form into smaller balls, drop 3 balls into greased muffin tins and make clover rolls. There are lots of options, so don't limit yourself!
Anyway, once they had risen, I melted some butter and brushed it across their tops so that they had a beautiful buttery sheen to them. ~Lick~
Although they did rise, they didn't rise as big as I had expected, just to add to my slight nervousness! Eek!
I preheated the oven to 350 degrees and in they went. I wish I could take a picture of how the house smells while they are baking - it is such a relaxing smell. *sigh*
After pulling them from the oven, I am realizing that what I have are a dozen yeast biscuits. Can you say "disappointing?" They taste perfectly fine, but they're more like biscuits instead of light and fluffy dinner rolls. So, while you are welcome to try this recipe, I promise to keep researching, trying and sharing until I finally get one that works like a charm and has the outcome I was hoping for.
So I suppose it is safe to say that not all kitchen attempts are a complete success, but I wouldn't call this one a total failure since we're eating them without complaint! We are enjoying them, actually, butter and some of the delicious jam we brought home with us from The Rheinlander. Not even remotely close to my MaMa's lovely and delicious dinner rolls, but still (thankfully) turned out yummy!
Have a good rest of the weekend and a happy week!
P.S. added Tuesday, January 24, 2012: After posting and reading my blog above, it occurred to me that I omitted a very, very, very critical step. Before putting the dough in the bowl to rise, I should have kneaded the dough for 8-10 minutes. Super big duh'oh! Ends up that I named this blog appropriately! While the dough did rise, it was not even close to the extent that it should have been. I noted at one point that I let it rise to "about" double the size, but now that I've viewed some youtube videos, I realize that the dough did *not* rise like it should have (yes, I really and truly am a rookie at this) and apparently I need to get my eyes checked if I thought it had risen to "almost double" now that I know what that really looks like.
So, I'll be trying this exact same recipe again, but I'll be injecting the kneading process into it properly next time!
1 comment:
These are impressive articles. Keep up the sunny handiwork.
Post a Comment