Hot damn, it has been a while since I’ve successfully cooked or baked anything. Seriously. I tried my hand at beef short ribs…didn’t cook them enough and they were too tough. A batch of oatmeal cookies went south when my stupid ass used instant oatmeal instead of rolled oats, making a crisp cookie with an interior texture similar to chewed bubblegum. I craved French onion soup, and then burned the onion instead of caramelizing, giving the soup a bitter aftertaste that no one liked. And let me tell you, nothing is more sad than a crock full of soup and coated in gooey, melty cheese that looks so tempting to eat…but you know it tastes like crap. I have been in a culinary slump, and these parmesan rolls were my first step toward recovery. Oh, I still messed a few things up, you can rest assured of that much. But thankfully, these rolls were forgiving enough to at least taste delicious for me. I found the recipe in this month’s Gourmet magazine, but you can find it online here. I was planning a lazy Sunday dinner of roast beef tenderloin with roasted potatoes and brussel sprouts, and wanted to bake something, anything to go with it. As far as bread recipes go, this recipe gave pretty good instructions and measurements. It is not like one of those crazy bread doughs that make you mix a bit, rest it an hour, mix more, rest an two hours, mix the last bit, rest five hours, etc. There is a bit of resting time, but all the mixing happens at once, and the instructions on that part were pretty straight forward. Mix yeast, warm milk and honey and let form. Add in dry ingredients (including cheese), mix in eggs, mix in softened pats of butter (pretty similar to a brioche construction), then cover and let rise until doubled.
That being said, I also used to be a pastry chef. I understood that to achieve a flaky, soft roll, I had to be careful not to overmix the dough, or it would develop too much gluten. Gluten is what gives a bread it’s strength to hold up after baking, and too much gluten in a soft roll will give you a dense, heavy product. The directions also needed a bit more instruction on how to roll the dough into rolls. It is pretty easy to do, but if I had never seen it done in person, it might have been more difficult. Then again, these rolls rise in a pan and fill in the free space, so even a badly rolled roll will be pretty forgiving, especially if you don’t care about the rolls looking uniform. I portioned the dough into twelve equal pieces using my handy-dandy digital scale.
At this point, it doesn’t really matter what they look like.
To roll the dough, grab one bit and cup your hand on top of it on a cutting board lightly sprinkled with flour (not too much or the dough won’t roll properly). Keep your hand cupped as you push the dough onto the board in a circular motion. Your hand should look like this:
What you are doing is rounding the dough into a ball. The board will catch a tiny bit of dough and slowly wrap it around the entire dough ball, making it look smooth and uniform. This is what you should get at the end:
Place all the rounded dough into a buttered pan. The recipe said to put all twelve into a 9inch x 2inch round cake pan, one inch apart. Um, that was not even possible. You see, I have this problem with following recipes exactly as written. It is a special talent of mine. Sometimes I get a bit cocky, and try to fix mistakes in the recipe that I find. And sometimes, I don’t fix it correctly. What it should have said was to put all twelve into the cake pan, with a tiny bit of space in between. When the dough goes into the oven and starts to rise, the closer it is to the other dough bits, the higher it will rise from the pressure of the other rolls pushing against it. When I put seven in a pan, they did not get as tall as they needed to, but they still tasted delicious.
After you place the dough into the pan, cover with a clean kitchen towel and let rise in a warm place until the dough fills the entire pan, roughly one hour. I like to turn on my oven and set the dough next to it on the counter. This is what you will end up with:
Brush it with a bit of milk or egg wash and bake at 375 F for 20 minutes, until brown and golden on top. This was my final product:
It wasn’t as tall as I would have liked it, but it was still a tender, flaky roll with a crisp crust and delicious cheese flavor.
And it went even better with my roast beef tenderloin. The tender, savory meat play perfectly against the salty Parmesan, the soft, crisp roll and the tiny smear of sweet butter. This roll had a lot of rising time (3 hours total), but it requires very little work on my part, so I will definitely be making it again.
~LTG!
