26 February 2010

bread machine dinner rolls

As promised, here is your post about the luscious, buttery, homemade rolls I used for our Super Noodle Doodle Sandwiches. The warm, yeasty smell permeated my house so completely, I felt I was floating on a cloud. I could even smell them the next morning. Oh carbs, how I love thee.

Bread machines are wonderful. No, it's really not that hard to do all the mixing yourself, but it's just so much easier to have something else do it. Plus, it puts the dough on a schedule, taking that much guess work out of it for me. (Recipe below.)

So you put the ingredients in the bread machine and let it do its thing. Or you magically mix the dough and let it rise somehow. Don't ask me about that. Then you scrape the icky sticky dough out of the pan and onto a floured surface (countertop for me). My dough was very sticky and needed a lot of flour. I kneaded the dough a few more times, adding flour liberally until it wasn't sticky anymore. Then I divided the dough--very unevenly--into rolls. I was aiming for hamburger bun size, and expected the dough to rise again and almost double in size, so I made dough blobs that were about half the size I wanted for my end result. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture of this step.

Place the dough blobs on a greased sheet pan, with enough space between them for them to double in size without running into each other. Place a clean dishtowel over the top. If your kitchen is below 70° F, like mine, preheat your oven to 200° F, let it sit at temperature for 5 minutes, turn OFF the oven, and insert your tray of dough blobs. Come back and check them in 20 minutes, they should have just about doubled in size. (If you don't use the oven technique, set them in a warm spot and check them in 40 minutes or so.) When they come out, they should look like this:
Bake them according to the directions on your recipe (or mine), and not only will your house smell like a bakery, but they'll come out looking like this:
Be sure to make some extra so you can eat one or two while they're still warm. Because you will definitely want to. And if you have the willpower to resist a warm, buttery roll fresh from the oven, you are a stronger person than I. I could use a lesson or two from you, because I broke right into one of these bad boys.
Yum.

Here's your printable recipe. Make them and everyone will love you. :)