End of Lent Bread:
Happy Easter readers! Sorry for my long absence, but – work. Now that April 15th is past, I can get back to cooking. And now you have a clue (an Easter egg, if you will) as to what sort of work I do.
Today’s project is bread – for a handful of reasons. I know there are gallons of goat milk languishing in my freezer while a countdown clock ticks away at their caseins, but this is special Easter bread. Firstly, consider the whole Passover/unleavened bread thing. This bread will be so leavened. And secondly, my mother gave up bread and pasta for Lent. Now she cracked on the pasta thing after about 16 minutes, but hasn’t had a bite of bread for 40 days and 40 nights. Nary a pizza crust, cheeseburger bun, nor sandwich has crossed her lips in over a month. Amazing right? So I want to make bread – and good bread – for Easter dinner.
I assemble my ingredients according to the Cook’s Country Cookbook’s recipe for “Fluffy Dinner Rolls”, which sound perfect. Sure I’d love to present my own made-up recipe, but this is baking folks – weights and ratios and arithmetic – not something you improvise. And baking is intimidating and can go wrong so quickly that I’m not breaking mom’s fast with a hard, dense, burned nugget.
Here we have whole milk, flour, butter, honey, salt, fast-acting yeast, and vegetable oil. Yes, it’s the gross-ola honey bear, but I’m not using my delicious local BFF honey on baking. And yes, I forgot to buy margarine (because I don’t buy margarine and haven’t for years) so when I read the part where you let the vegetable shortening melt, I panic, then blessedly unearth a tin of Crisco that I keep for when only homemade french fries will do. Even more blessedly, it has not been used yet, so there are no potato bits suspended in it. Also the recipe calls for unsalted butter, which I do not keep in the house. I am not one of those people that think the trace amount of salt flavor in a few tablespoons of butter is going to push a recipe into too-salty territory. Food snobs will tell you otherwise. I will tell you that salt tastes great!
Here is an artsy-fartsy forced perspective shot, since I’m feeling creative today:
I also have this:
Because there is a very good chance I will ruin this bread and still want to provide my mother with some sort of buttery gluteny loaf-type thing. Just in case. A good cook always has a back up plan. A good cook also always reads the whole recipe before she starts, but you can’t have everything. Ahem.
First the milk (1.5 cups), honey (1/3 cup), Crisco (4T) and butter (3T) get nuked until the butter and Crisco begin to melt. Here they are before (yuck):
And here after (better):
Whisk in one egg and let it cool to around 110 degrees. Meanwhile in a stand mixer (yay!) blend five cups of flour, one package of instant yeast, and two teaspoons of salt. When well blended, add the milk/egg mixture. Blend at medium-low speed for eight minutes. That seems a long time, but when I read further into the recipe, I see that I will need those eight minutes, as I have to have at the ready a clean and lightly floured work surface and a large lightly oiled bowl. Usually I panic at this stage, since I generally don’t have three square inches of counter space all in a row. But I use the calming eight minutes to clear off, clean, and lightly flour a chunk of space and lightly oil a large bowl while singing songs from Rent in my head, but substituting the word “Lent” to see if I can make it work. I do this because I can’t control what my mind does sometimes. “We’re not gonna pay-ay…This year’s Lent! Lent lent lent lent lent! ‘Cause everything is Lent!”
I turn the dough onto the counter and knead into a smooth round ball. I do a lovely job and manage to get flour all over my arms picturesquely. The egg is in the picture for size comparison. The ball goes into the bowl and gets covered with greased plastic wrap (thank you, spray can oil.) It will rise for one to two hours.
And now it is risen:
I left the egg in for comparison.
The next step is to turn the dough out onto a (clean) work surface (yay me!) and stretch it into an even 15-inch log.
Close.
Now it gets cut into exactly 15 equal-sized pieces. Well I did my best.
Line a 13×9 baking pan with foil and lightly spray with oil. Keeping the dough covered with the greasy plastic wrap as much as possible, work each piece of dough with your hands into smooth, taut ball. This is getting intimate. Again, I do my best. See how equally sized all my pieces are? This means they will cook evenly. Shut up.
Cover again with the flimsy, floppy piece of greasy plastic (loosely this time) and set in a warm-ish spot for the final rise for 45 minutes to an hour.
The last step is to beat the comparison egg with one tablespoon of water, brush the top of each roll, and pop them into a 350 degree oven for 20 to 30 minutes. The final product:
Num. They could probably have browned on top a bit more, but the bottom is golden and crunchy, and the middle is soft and bready. And they’re all totally the same size. I should probably sample one before tonight. Just to make sure.
It’s like a butter sandwich.
illdothedisheslater 