Bread - Its Sticks, Just Got Sticker - Part II

Okay, so I found another bread recipe online for dinner rolls. Who doesn’t love dinner rolls? You can have them with almost anything, right?

But wait… this dough called for 3.3/4 cups of all purpose flour.

Now we all know what all purpose flour is for. It’s for everything from baking cakes to making sauce, so how come it’s being used for bread rolls? All purpose flour has very little, if at all, protein and gluten formation possibilities. Every time the tiny bacteria eats the protein and churns out CO2, it ain’t gonna get trapped in the dough.

I don’t want that to happen, and yet this recipe states it so. Hmmm…so going with my gut instinct, I reduced 1.3/4 cup of the all purpose and added the same amount of bread flour into it.

And when to work beating the hell out of the dough.

This is really messy work so forgive me if I didn’t take an pics of the dough and all that. I really need a solid kitchen table to work the dough. The one I have in the kitchen is unacceptable work surface, with all the paint flaking and cracks, nuh uh. The counters which are solid however, are all occupied to the max with my mother’s collection of kitchen appliances and quaint ‘might needs’. Like the 3 blenders, or the 2 juicers, and for the love of Martha Stewart, throw that broken scale already. She has a new one from last Christmas and yet the old one is still there, occupying space.

I know, perhaps one day, God willing, I would own a place of my own and perhaps clutter my own kitchen the same way. By that time I will give permission to whoever resides with me to question and in certain extreme cases, take action when necessary (like calling my mother for instance).

*Ahem* But I digress, back to the dough.

To my pleasant surprise it raised rather nicely. Although a bit smaller than I liked. The loaf earlier on was only 1 cup of flour and yet rose twice the size this one is, but then size doesn’t matter, its how you handle it. It ended up even smaller once I punched it lightly for the 2nd rising.

After the 2nd rising, gently took it out, shaped it, cut it into small mounds and rolled it into a semblance of a ball and placed them in greased trays. I also painted some egg yolk over each just for the colour and shine.

Into the oven.

Okay, this recipe had butter and sugar, so it bakes rather fast…which I forgot when I went into my room for a break and was lost in the internet reading on more bread science.

By the time I remembered, the 1st batch’s bottom was burnt. Awww crap. In goes the 2nd and 3rd batch.

Now the 3rd batch, I ran out of baking trays (the 1st one still cooling) so I used a muffin tray and put in smaller balls of dough in there. The 2nd and 3rd batch came out rather well.

The rolls went kind of flat during the baking process and when I cracked one open, there’s no sense of gluten in it at all.

See when you break bread, you have the gluten stretching against the pull. You can feel it, especially when you bite into it and with all the pockets the gluten makes, the bread is soft and fluffy.

Mine was not.

Yet… it kinda was.

Kind of hard to describe, it had a strange consistency between a muffin and a dinner roll. This I blame on the all purpose flour. Think about it, the recipe that uses all purpose flour, butter, eggs and sugar, can be made into muffins, cakes or pancakes, but if you add yeast to it, it makes dinner rolls? Doesn’t add up.

So I learned my lesson to trust my gut instinct more and to use more bread flour the next round.

Glad to say though that this time, despite the confusing texture, the taste was good. The 3rd batch of the mini bread bits in shape of the muffin tray was gone by the time I remembered to take pictures.

^_^

This time, even mom liked the taste. Heh.

PS: I would've uploaded 2 more pics but for some reason I keep getting an error whenever I try. Could be my crappy connection. It's been acting up these past 3 days.