Bread - Raisin Rolls

It's been almost three and a half months.  Clearly I am neglecting my duties as a blogger.  It's like I've been putting nursing school, staying home with short stuff, and visiting family before cooking the recipes of the Ladies of Zion.  I should probably reexamine my priorities.  Upon finishing my first semester of nursing classes, I intended to do a bunch of recipes and posts, but traveling north, then southwest, and all of the prep and recovery from that hasn't exactly been conducive to doing much extra cooking.  Perhaps I can make an effort to do more cooking and blogging this spring semester.

So now that that is out of the way, let's get on to the bread at hand.  As you can see below, I'm on a page with three recipes for rolls/buns, and a banana loaf.  I did applesauce nut bread previously, so the banana loaf was out.  The lack of directions regarding an ice box was intriguing for the ice box rolls.  I had to ultimately go with the raisin rolls though because despite knowing that Sarah would be unhappy with the choice, making a recipe with no directions at all seemed like it might be a fun project.  I've made enough bread in the past to have a fairly good sense of the process... more or less.

No directions.  What could go wrong?

Preparation

There are immediately a few questions.  The first one is about the yeast.  I'm sure yeast cakes can be found somewhere, but it's not common.  I've got instant yeast, as well as active dry yeast, but no clue how they compare to cake yeast.  Thanks to the magic of the internets, I found someone who does know.  Please meet Father Dominic.  I've only watched the video below, but it looks like he's got quite a few good tips that are worth learning.  I've been making much of our bread for a few years now, and though what I make is decent I know I still have a lot to learn.  Anyway, here is Father Dominic with the lowdown on cake yeast.  Take notes, kids.

Now that I know I can use my active dry yeast, it is time to get our mise en place.

Once again, I'm doing my best to keep my cluttered counter out of the picture.

I debated whether to use butter or shortening instead of the called for lard, but these folks look so happy, I think I made the right choice in pulling the lard out of the freezer.

Well, if it makes people happy, in love, and it has no substitutes, I'd better not use anything else.  Lard, it is!  But here I'm getting ahead of myself.  Let's scald the milk and let it cool first

Too much scald.  Not enough cool.

As the recipe is a little confusing, I will also need some assistance from a no-longer-napping Thomas.

He's good at helping to "dump i' in"

Once we had bloomed the yeast, cooled and added the milk, I realized that the called for four cups of liquid would result in a HUGE batch of raisin rolls.  Sarah's not going to want many of these, and I don't want to be the one to have to finish three dozen rolls myself, so we started over with a half recipe... without boiling over milk this time.  For what it's worth, I wound up using about 3 1/3 tsp. of yeast.

I was just a little unsure how to incorporate the lard into the bread dough.  I initially thought about just putting the softened lard right into the bloomed yeast, but my assistant didn't care for this method.

Me:  Thomas, why isn't it dumping out?

Thomas:  My don't know.

He taps on the bottom of the measuring scoop and gets a little on his fingers.  He tries to wipe it off and makes a face.

Thomas:  I don't like it.

Tough, kid.  Lard has no substitutes, and it makes people happy, so suck it up.  This probably wasn't a very good idea anyway since I wasn't using the creaming method like one would do with cookies, and putting soft lard into liquid just seemed like a poor choice.  One of my favorite sandwich bread recipes uses melted butter, so I melted the lard and in it went along with additional water, sugar, salt, and the beaten egg.

The next question though is how much flour to use.  How much flour should we add, Thomas?

I don't know either buddy.

So we will just add flour until the dough is stiff.  Can you help me count, bud?

I had to help him get the right fingers up.

5 is easier.

I actually put in about 4 3/4 cups of flour in until it seemed relatively stiff.  I added approximately 1/4 cup more when kneading the dough.  About half way through kneading, I added some raisins and kneaded them in.

Is that going to be enough?  Beats the heckoutta ma.

I added about the same amount a second time.  It seemed like enough.  I don't know how much I put in in total.  If you really want to know, count up the raisins in the picture above and multiply by two.  After about ten minutes total of kneading, I put the smooth, nice-feeling dough into a lightly oiled bowl to rise.  50 minutes later or so, it was time to punch the dough down, and shape into rolls.  I've never made rolls before, as evidenced by the variety of sizes

How's that?

Sarah arrived home from work, saw bread rising, and then promptly looked sad when she learned there are raisins in the rolls.

"They look like good rolls.  But why couldn't you have made something actually good?

Another hour or so of rising, and two pans of rolls were ready to go in the oven.  I only had the other recipes on the page to use as a reference for temperature and time, so I went with 400 degrees for 15 minutes.  They only registered 135 degrees after that amount of time, so I put them back in for an additional ten minutes but with some foil on the top since the rolls were already pretty brown.  Here then, is the final result.

Not too bad.  Could be much worse.

Tasting and Reaction

The rolls had a nice crust around the edge, and smelled very pleasantly like fresh bread... as they should.  They could have looked a little nicer though as they were a little dull on top.  But I'm nitpicking here.  I quickly tore one off and bit in.  Warm, crusty, yeasty fresh bread is hard to beat, even if it is a bit plain.  And that's just what these were, plain.  There wasn't much flavor to speak of outside of the occasional raisin, I'm afraid.  Sarah was skeptical, but could not resist fresh, hot bread.

She tore off a roll that looked to have a small number of raisins, ripped it in half, buttered it, and took a bite.  Almost immediately, a sour expression crossed her face, "Ugh, hidden raisin."

So if it's not clear already, Sarah does not like raisins... at all.

Sarah looking at another bun - I think this one only has two raisins in it.  That's ok.

Me - They're alright.  Nice, hot bread with a crispy edge.

Sarah - It seems like it should be sweeter.  I'm not sure if this should be a coffee roll or a dinner roll.  Also, there's not a whole lot of flavor, just like a lot of food from the 1950s.

Me - They could maybe have had the tops brushed with melted butter or something before baking.  They are perfectly inoffensive.

Sarah comes back later

Sarah - If not for the raisins… and the gluttony, I would have more of them.  I like the hearts though.

She tears out one of the heart pieces and whispers to the raisins, “Where are you hiding?”  She butters it and walks away taking a bite then stops in her tracks, “Oh!  Rogue raisin,” and returns to the kitchen muttering.

Me – you are funny

Sarah – Well, there are few things worse then ordering a cinnamon roll or something and discovering unwanted raisins.  Maybe snakes, maybe spiders.  Rogue raisins are right up there.

Aside from Sarah's hate of raisins, the rolls are fine.  Because she feels so strongly about it I don't feel bad, but they could probably use at least 50% more raisins as each roll has maybe three raisins.  Seems a little skimpy to me.  They could also use some more flavor in general as they're just kind of raisins wrapped in white bread.  Perhaps dipping each roll in melted butter would provide that flavor as well as allow the rolls to be pulled apart more cleanly.

As for the boys, well they were asleep or going to sleep.  James says he'll have one in his lunch tomorrow but will pull out the raisins.  Thomas... well who knows what Thomas will eat day to day.  It's a mystery.

In the end, these were just fine.  There wasn't anything hideous about them like some previous recipes but rather they suffered from the same affliction that so many other recipes that the Ladies produced suffered from:  too little flavor.  The texture was nice.  Hot out of the pan, I ate well more than my share.  They could just have used a little something else before I could really call them "good bread."  I would probably rate these somewhere between Norwegian Meatballs and Marshmallow Pie.  So definitely better than average, Mrs. Loren Lord.  Well done.

Next time (not remotely as long as it took this one to write):  Cakes!