Table Bread: Sweet Rolls

This week I have been exploring the breakfast side of bread. I just bought a copy of a wonderful book: “The Breadbaker’s Apprentice”

I can't say enough about how much I LOVE this book. Peter Reinhart wants not just to teach you how to bake bread but also how to understand what baking bread is really about. As he puts it in the text, Peter wishes to turn you in to a “spiritual baker” not a “technical baker”. Now, if you missed the hippie wagon like I did this may put you off at first. What he is actually saying is that his intent is not for you to MEMORIZE recipes for good artisan bread, but to understand what is going on so you can play with the recipes and make them your own.

…But I digress…

The two recipes I baked this week came from this amazing book.

Cinnamon rolls were the favorite of the family. The bread is just sweet enough and the icing and the walnuts top off what is a fluffy and cinnamony roll. These cinnamon rolls were amazingly easy to make, took about three hours to fully ferment and about 30 to bake.

English muffins were the favorite of my beautiful wife for her eggs benedict. These English muffins are actually fried in a pan and then baked to completion. Again, you couldn’t ask for an easier experience for such amazing results. The only thing I will do different next time is allow the yeast to grow a little longer. This was an amateur mistake I made. I was using active dry yeast and mixed the yeast (per instructions) into the flour and kneaded the dough. After I sat down to let the dough ferment I realized the next chapter in the book was “Yeast and Fermenting”, my mistake was obvious in seconds. The recipe called for instant yeast which can gain enough moisture from the dough to grow, however (and the book mentions this specifically) that active dry yeast has to have a lot more water and time to ferment on it’s own…. they still came out pretty darn good.