Homemade Hamburger Rolls? You're Welcome!

It took me long enough. But I finally baked hamburger rolls.

Summer cookouts, I'm ready for you.

It turned out to be surprisingly easy. I used my Dinner Roll recipe, which you can find here. But I'm going to rewrite it here, because my process has evolved a little over time.

Dinner Rolls

Based on Aunt Betty's Sweet Roll Dough

1½ C lukewarm water

1 T yeast

¼ C sugar

¼ C canola oil

¼ C instant potato flakes

½ C instant nonfat dry milk (9 T non-instant)

¾ tsp. salt

2 eggs

1½ C (6.4 oz.) soft white whole wheat flour + 3 C (12.8 oz.) hard white whole wheat flour

Note: This is my preferred flour combination. Other alternatives:

1½ C (6.4 oz.) soft white whole wheat flour + 3 C (12.8 oz.) hard red whole wheat flour

1½ C (6.4 oz.) soft white whole wheat flour + 3 C (12.8 oz.) all-purpose flour

4½ C (19.2 oz.) hard white whole wheat, hard red whole wheat, or all-purpose flour

Pour warm water in stand mixer (KitchenAid) bowl. Add sugar, yeast, and the soft white whole wheat flour. Using the paddle (not the dough hook), mix on lowest setting while adding the canola oil, potato flakes, dry milk, and salt. Stop the mixer and add a few spoonfuls of the hard white whole wheat flour, and then the eggs. Resume mixing on lowest setting; add the rest of the flour, and continue mixing for 5 minutes. Turn off mixer and cover the bowl with damp kitchen towel. Let dough sit for 30 minutes.

On a clean, dry counter, sprinkle about ½ C hard white whole wheat flour. Have some more on hand, just in case. Lower the mixing bowl and detach the paddle, disturbing the dough as little as possible. Use a wet spoon to scrape dough from the paddle into the bowl. Use the wet spoon to scrape the dough from the bowl onto the floured counter. It will come out fairly easily because of the rising.

Knead the dough 40-50 times, until it is smooth and elastic, but not dry.

Place the dough in a large bowl with a small amount of canola oil to coat the surface. Cover with wax paper or plastic wrap. Set in a cold place—probably the refrigerator—for 1½ hours.

Punch down the dough and fold it a few times. Divide it into 24 pieces. A dough scraper is great for cutting the dough. Form each piece into a ball by stretching the top and pinching the ends together at the bottom. Place the rolls about ½-1 inch apart on buttered (or parchment papered) baking sheets. 24 fit nicely on a baker's half sheet. Cover the rolls; let rise at warm room temperature for 45 minutes. If your baking sheet situation is such that you won't be able to fit all of the rolls in the oven at the same time, set the ones that will have to wait in the refrigerator, setting them out again when you put the first ones in the oven.

For Hamburger Rolls: After making the balls, flatten each ball into a 3-inch round. Place the rounds about ½ inch apart on buttered (or parchment papered) baking sheets. 12 fit nicely on a baker's half sheet.

A few minutes before the rolls are finished rising, preheat the oven to 400°F. Bake the rolls at 400°F for 5 minutes; reduce temperature to 350°F and continue baking another 10-12 minutes, or until the rolls are browned on top. Remove the pan from the oven and set to cool on a rack.

After the rolls are completely cool, put them in clean plastic bags. Freeze any that you will not use within a couple of days.

Maple Goodness in Rolls!

There are people who love the Maple Oatmeal Bread--one version or the other--so much that they buy an extra loaf to eat on their way home.

And now I make it with local maple syrup. My friend in Jamesville has maple trees. She and her family work together to make the maple syrup, and it is delicious!

Today I baked Whole-Wheat Maple Oatmeal Rolls. My first attempt last week didn't work out so well. I just made rolls out of the bread dough. But they were doughy and heavy.

Today I made adjustments based on my tried and true dinner roll recipes. I increased the amount of oil and added instant potato flakes and instant dry milk. The aroma of maple syrup filled the kitchen as they finished baking. They came out of the oven a beautiful golden color.

They were light and tender, with full-flavored maple goodness.

I love living in maple syrup country!

Whole-Wheat Maple Oatmeal Rolls

2 1/2 cups boiling water

1 cup rolled oats

3/4 cup maple syrup

¼ C canola oil

1 T instant dry yeast

2 teaspoons salt

¼ C instant potato flakes

1 C instant nonfat dry milk

1¼ C (5.3 oz.) soft white-wheat flour

3¾ C (7.5 oz. + 8.5 oz.) hard white-wheat flour

Put the oats into a bowl. Pour the boiling water over the oats and set aside for an hour.

Mix the syrup and oil into the oats. Combine the yeast, salt, potato flakes, dry milk, soft white-wheat flour, and 1¾ C (7.5 oz.) hard white-wheat flour in a bowl and add to the oat mixture, mixing well. Cover the bowl and let rise for an hour.

Add more flour, 1/2 cup at a time, until the dough is the correct consistency. Knead for 5 minutes; let sit covered for 5 minutes; knead for another 2-3 minutes. Let rise in an oiled bowl. Shape the dough into 24 rolls and place on greased baking pan. Cover and let rise another 45 minutes.

Bake at 350°F for about 20 minutes.

Welsh Cakes

Listening to Earth Eats awhile back, Chef Daniel Orr gave a recipe for Welsh Cakes. I had never heard of them before, but they sounded good. So I tried them! Here's the recipe. (Note: The second item should be 3 ounces granulated sugar, not flour. I listened to the podcast again just to make sure!)

These sounded so good, I dove right in trying three versions: all-purpose flour, hard white whole-wheat flour, and hard red whole-wheat flour.

Other than the three different flour types and using raisins and cinnamon, I followed the recipe as given.

Frying them up!

Outwardly, all three versions look the same:

Welsh Cake versions, clockwise from the left: White Whole-Wheat, All-Purpose, and Red Whole-Wheat

From this very limited experience, I found the Welsh Cakes to be like a combination of pancakes and biscuits or scones. All three versions tasted good, but I preferred the more-flavorful whole-wheat versions.

The dough is quite delicate, so you need to be careful while frying them. I used my doughnut cutter, minus the center circle. That was too big. Next time I will use something that is about 2 inches in diameter. Upon further reading, that seems to be a more typical size. I think they will be easier to handle.

I put too much sugar on them. Next time I will just sprinkle a little on top, more for looks. They are already pretty sweet.

Like pancakes, biscuits, and scones, these taste fantastic fresh, but not as good later. So make them! Use whole-wheat flour! They are really good! And really easy! But just make what you will eat right away.

Cinnamon, Cinnamon, or Cinnamon?

My daughter Kirsten gave me some Saigon cinnamon last fall. Recently a friend gave me some Ceylon cinnamon. So I thought I would see how they compare to my "regular" cinnamon.

There are lots of things that are flavored by cinnamon: apple pie, apple crisp, apple cake, baked apples, cinnamon rolls, cinnamon-raisin bread, zucchini bread, bread pudding, spice cake, snickerdoodles, and I could keep going.

I settled on snickerdoodles because cinnamon is the predominant flavor.

As you probably know, when you make snickerdoodles, you roll balls of cookie dough in a cinnamon-sugar mixture. Here are the three mixtures:

First, we have McCormick-brand cinnamon. It isn't identified as any particular kind, so it is probably either Chinese cinnamon or Indonesian cinnamon (see Cinnamomum Cassia in Wikipedia). Next, is Costco's Kirkland-brand Saigon cinnamon. Finally, we have Ceylon cinnamon, packaged locally by a company called Hey Rose (315-730-7498).

I baked the cookies--a pan of each kind of cinnamon-sugar mixture. After they cooled, we tasted them.

Snickerdoodles with Ceylon Cinnamon

We thought the Ceylon cinnamon was smooth and mild.

Snickerdoodles with Saigon Cinnamon

We thought the Saigon cinnamon was sharp and robust.

Snickerdoodles with McCormick Cinnamon: Chinese or Indonesian

We thought the McCormick Cinnamon was coarse yet flavorful.

Our taste-testing group was small. The toddlers happily ate all the cookies they could get their hands on without comment. The adults were pretty evenly split about which of the three types they preferred. They, too, happily ate all the cookies they could get their hands on.

In conclusion, the cinnamons have definite differences. Which you choose may be determined by your own preferences and by your intended use.

I have unanswered questions that will require further testing, which I am happy to do!

Snickerdoodles

1½ C sugar

½ C butter, softened

½ C shortening

2 eggs

2¾ C (11.7 oz.) flour*

2 tsp. cream of tartar

1 tsp. baking soda

¼ tsp. salt

3 T sugar

3 tsp. ground cinnamon

Heat oven to 400°F. Mix 1½ C sugar, butter, shortening, and eggs in a large bowl. Stir in flour, cream of tartar, baking soda, and salt. Shape dough by rounded teaspoonfuls into balls.

Mix 3 T sugar and the cinnamon; roll balls in mixture. Place about 2 inches apart on ungreased cookie sheet. Bake until set, 8 to 10 minutes. Immediately remove from cookie sheet.

Makes about 5 dozen cookies.

*I used 100% whole-wheat flour, ground from hard white wheat. The flavor and consistency were great!

Chocolate Bread--Beta Testing

I decided to bake chocolate bread for Valentine's Day. I had never eaten chocolate bread, but I had eaten chocolate croissants, which are heavenly. Maybe next year I'll be ready to make chocolate croissants.

I envisioned chocolate bread as similar to cinnamon bread. Except chocolate, not cinnamon. I read many recipes and came up with this:

I used my roll dough and Nestle's semi-sweet chocolate chips. I made two half-batches. One was 1/4 soft white whole-wheat flour and 3/4 all-purpose flour. The other was 1/4 soft white whole-wheat flour and 3/4 hard white whole-wheat flour. With each, I made three little loaves of chocolate bread and one large loaf of cinnamon bread.

Pictured above: on the left is the 100% whole-wheat bread; on the right is the mostly-white bread.

All testers, ages 17 months to adult, loved both kinds. The adults agreed that there was (gasp!) too much chocolate. In my next attempt, I plan to melt the chocolate and spread it on the dough before rolling it up.

One of the beta testers took the whole-wheat cinnamon bread home.

Further testing of this batch will occur after dinner tonight!

Blueberry Muffins--Updated

I volunteered to bake a dozen blueberry muffins for an upcoming meeting.

Since I don't have a blueberry muffin recipe that I'm very enthusiastic about, I thought I would look around for one. I bought lemons when I went shopping because I definitely wanted to find a recipe that included lemon. I was also hoping for a whole-grain recipe.

I got lucky! The first place I looked, I found what turned out to be a great recipe. Thank you, King Arthur Flour recipes. Here is the recipe I found.

My tweaks:

• I used flour that I ground from hard white wheat.
• You'll notice that this recipe does not have any lemon in it. Otherwise, it looked so good that I checked the reviews. Some people had used lemon zest and reduced or left out the almond extract. So I left out the almond extract and added the zest of one lemon.
• I used frozen blueberries for two reasons. For one thing, I already had some. Also, they are the small kind, from Maine, so you end up with the blueberry-goodness distributed more evenly throughout each muffin. The only bad part is that frozen blueberries tend to leave blue streaks in the muffins.
• Another day I may write about the issues related to buying fresh blueberries in the middle of winter in a northern climate.
• I didn't put a topping on because I didn't want to add any sugar. I think these muffins are already plenty sweet. They are muffins, not cupcakes, after all. In particular, I didn't want to use their suggested cinnamon-sugar topping because I don't think lemon and cinnamon mix very well. Another time I would like to try sprinkling some chopped or slivered almonds on top, but I didn't have any today. (I only buy almonds if I plan to use them for something specific because I love them way. too. much!)
• I followed their directions for mixing the ingredients together. But next time I think I will add the wet ingredients to the creamed mixture, and then add the dry ingredients, followed by stirring in the blueberries. Their order seemed counterintuitive to me, since you want to mix the flour as little as possible. I'll update this if I find I'm wrong. Update: My way of mixing--dry ingredients after wet ingredients--was easier and worked beautifully.

The muffins smelled divine while they were baking.

The texture was very delicate. The taste was heavenly. No butter needed.

These muffins combine great taste and texture with 100% fresh whole-grain goodness.

Whole Wheat Maple Oatmeal Bread

This is good-tasting bread! The maple and the oats are prominent and yet complemented by the whole wheat.

I hope other people like this bread, because I want to keep making it. It gives me satisfaction to bake bread and rolls for people. It gives me great satisfaction to bake whole-grain bread and rolls for people!

This is the same as the Maple Oatmeal Bread. Except the flour is all whole wheat, freshly-ground, of course. A quarter of the flour is from soft white wheat. The rest of the flour is from hard white wheat.

 

Happy Oatmeal Month!

Fusion Pizza

I'm not trying to be trendy. This pizza developed from a love of buffalo chicken and a need for lower calorie pizza crust.

My daughter shared with me this great recipe for Buffalo Chicken:

Crockpot Buffalo Chicken

3 lbs frozen (or fresh) chicken breasts
1 bottle Franks buffalo sauce
1 packet of ranch seasoning (Hidden Valley)

Throw it all in the crockpot on low for 6-7 hours. Then shred the chicken, then cook for another hour in the crockpot to soak up juices. Then eat and enjoy!!

It is so good! I've used up to double the amount of chicken called for with excellent results. Also, I don't have a crockpot, so I put everything in a Dutch oven, put it in the oven at 350 degrees for 30 minutes and then turn down the heat to the lowest setting, cook it for 3 or so hours, shred the chicken, and then return it to the oven for another hour. So easy!

I'm sure you can imagine lots of ways to use it. Quesadillas come to mind. But my favorite way to use it is on pizza.

You can use regular pizza dough. If you want to lighten things up, try using flour tortillas. These days I use the flour of hard white wheat for tortillas.

I discovered I can bake my tortillas on my pizza stone!

Here I'm using my new pizza peel to set the tortilla onto my new pizza stone. (Go here and scroll down to see my old pizza stone.)

The baked tortilla is ready to come out. I find this an easier way to bake them than on top of the stove, pizza or not. Either way is pretty easy, though!

And, yes, I've already managed to stain my pizza stone. The tortilla is so thin that the toppings weigh it down too much to slide off of the peel. That's how I learned to use parchment paper under the tortillas. By the way, you can put toppings on tortillas unbaked or baked. Since I wasn't making pizza with all of the tortillas, I just found it easier to pre-bake the tortillas today. Then I put the leftover ones in a gallon-size ziploc bag and put them in the refrigerator for another day.

Now for the pizza topping:

Mix together 2 parts ranch dressing and 1 part Frank's Red Hot Original Cayenne Pepper Sauce. I use light ranch dressing, or part fat-free. Some people use blue cheese dressing. Spread it thinly on the tortilla (or pizza dough).

Layer Crockpot Buffalo Chicken on top.

Sprinkle shredded mozzarella cheese, and perhaps a bit of shredded Parmesan cheese, on top.

Variations: Before adding the cheese, top with some cooked broccoli and/or sautéed onions and peppers.

 Baked to perfection!

 It's ready to be eaten!

The Quest: Whole-Grain Cracked Wheat Bread

Cracked Wheat Bread--the favorite bread of many.

It is good bread: soft and springy with the chewy nuttiness of the cracked wheat; salty, and sweet with molasses.

It contains whole grain: freshly-cracked wheat berries.

But the flour is white flour: high quality flour--King Arthur bread flour--unbleached and unbromated. But lacking the nutritious bran and wheat germ of whole-grain flour.

Could I use whole-grain flour and maintain the distinctive taste and texture?

Today I am using flour freshly-ground from hard white wheat. This flour is milder than "regular" red wheat flour.

It is good bread: soft and springy with the chewy nuttiness of the cracked wheat; salty, and sweet with molasses.

The whole-grain flour adds some welcome complexity to the flavor. And the nutrition of whole grain.

I prefer this version of cracked wheat bread.

What about you?

Aunt Betty's Cracked Wheat Bread

Pour 4 C boiling water over 2 C (8.5 oz.) cracked wheat and stir. Let stand until most of the water is soaked up, but not dry.

Add:

⅓ C molasses

½ C plus 2 Tbsp. canola oil

Stir together and add, mixing with the dough hook of an electric mixer if you have it:

1 lb. flour (about 3½-4 C)--white bread flour or hard white whole-wheat flour

½ C sugar

2 Tbsp. yeast

1 C instant powdered milk

2 Tbsp. salt

Add and mix:

2 eggs

1¼ lbs. flour (about 4-4½ C)--white bread flour or hard white whole-wheat flour

Pour the dough onto a floured counter and knead it, adding more flour as needed, 1-2 C, until dough is smooth and elastic.

Place dough in an oiled bowl; cover with waxed paper. Let rise once. Measure and shape into 4 or 5 loaves. Let rise and bake at 350°F for about 40 minutes.

Rant Alert!

I love SparkPeople.com. It's a great website for healthy living. I subscribe to their SparkPeople Recipe of the Day, and I've found many great recipes this way. Today's recipe was billed as whole-grain maple cookies. I was interested! Part of the description said " ... it's a great way to incorporate whole grains." It sounded promising! So I clicked on the link to get the full recipe. Now, it is a cookie recipe, so I wasn't surprised to see brown sugar. In fact, I was glad to see maple syrup and honey, too. An egg and some vanilla--good. Then it called for shortening. I wasn't happy about that, because I'm trying to get away from shortening as much as possible, but that's a discussion for another day. Perhaps a pie baking day.

Next came rolled oats or seven grain cereal mix, Bob's Red Mill's mix recommended. Great choices! The next ingredient was all-purpose flour. Why?! This recipe was looking so good! If hard red whole-wheat flour's taste is too strong, why not hard white or soft white whole-wheat flour? Or this recipe looks like oat flour might work.

Of course, I advocate using freshly-ground flour, but those whole-grain wheat flours are readily available in most grocery stores. Locally, Wegmans even sells them under their brand name. You can easily make oat flour from rolled oats in your blender.

So my first complaint is that they could have easily made this recipe really whole-grain. My second--and bigger--complaint is that the recipe is labeled whole-grain and it is not! It contains whole-grains. I see this a lot, where a recipe is labeled as whole-grain and it is only partly whole-grain. I'm not mad at anyone for not using whole-grains or only using them for part of the grain or flour in a recipe. I have plenty of recipes like that. I just ask that they not label them whole-grain if they are not.

Okay. I feel better now.

P.S.--I will save this recipe and try it with different whole-grain flours. I think it will be really good. I'm not sure what to do about the shortening, but I'll investigate the possibilities. If you know of anything, let me know, please!