Soft And Fluffy Bread Rolls

At our local National Trust garden, the café serves soup with a wonderfully shaggy granary bread, which is Lundulph's favourite and for years now I've been trying to work out how to make something similar at home. As I'm now housewifing for a bit, I thought I'd dig out the various recipes I've bookmarked and work through them, starting with this one.

The photos on the web page appealed, not the claim to be able to do them in an hour. So I set about to convert to metric system and also weighed things to get a more precise recipe. As usual, I did this on the fly and got a bit confused about the liquids, but the end result was pretty good, so it wasn't bad. I also tried out the dough proofing function of my oven, I've never done this before. I don't think it speeded things up too much compared to room temperature, it wasn't my intention to rush the proofing stages like in the original recipe.

Ingredients

Makes 12 large buns

620 g (9 dl) strong flour
60 g (4 tbsp) granulated sugar
1½ tsp salt
3.85 dl semi-skimmed milk
57 g unsalted butter
20 g fresh yeast
1½ tsp lemon juice

Method

1. If using proofing drawer, warm it up. Weigh the bowl that will be used for proofing when it's empty and note the weight.
2. Place the dry ingredients in the bowl of the Kitchen Assistent machine. Butter a large baking tin where all the rolls can fit with room to proof and set aside.
3. Warm up the milk and butter in a saucepan on low heat until the butter just melts, but the mixture is at finger warmth.
4. Add the yeast and stir until all has disssolved.
5. Start the machine so that the dry ingredients mix well, then pour in the milk/butter mixture and finally the lemon juice.
6. Let the machine work for a few minutes until a soft dough forms.
7. Turn out the dough onto the work surface and fold it a couple of times to form a ball, then cover the bowl with cling film or a lid and place in the proofing drawer of a warm place until it more than doubles in size.
8. Weigh the risen dough in its bowl, deduct the bowl weight, then divide by 12 and cut up into equal weight pieces. Mine worked out to just under 95 g each.
9. Shape each piece to a round ball and place in the baking tin. Cover with cling film or a lid and let proof until they've filled up the baking tin.
10. Remove from the oven and pre-heat it to 190° C, then bake the rolls for 17 minutes - keep an eye on them and cover with a piece of metal foil if they go too brown on top.
11. Remove from the oven and leave to cool down fully.

I left them in the baking tray overnight and had one for breakfast this morning - I cut it into slices and had it with butter and jam and honey. Yummy and so soft!

Lundulph's verdict was that they were quite sweet and with a bit of sugar glaze on top, they would work very well along with a cup of tea. And it's true, there is a lot of sugar in these, I'll repeat this recipe and reduce the amount a bit, to see how that goes.

The confusion I had was that there should have been 1.75 dl water + 2.1 dl milk.

I've also recently started using the dough hook on my Kitchen Assistent machine, but I'm not sure if it makes much difference. I skimmed through the recommendations in the instruction manual and it seems it's very limited when this dough hook should be used and the few times I've used it, I've always had to "help" it out as the dough either got stuck and wouldn't knead or got plastered on the walls of the bowl mostly. So I'll go back to the more general purpose roller.

Update 2020-04-10:
I've now swapped out 100 g of the strong flour for strong wholemeal flour, reduced the sugar to 2 tbsp and also I make 2 loaves, rather than 12 baps. The bread isn't as fluffy, but is very good for toasting and now works with both savoury and sweet toppings. For the loaves, bake for 15 minutes, then cover so the crust doesn't go too dark, then bake for a further 10 - 15 minutes.