Home Made Bread Rolls

Last Wednesday, Kim thought about making some wholemeal bread rolls for lunch. She though of it because she notice that there was a dough making setting on the bread maker, and wanted to see if we could make our own rolls cheaper than buying them. Usually we would have bought these from our local Bakers Delight, but as I didn’t feel very well, we decided to give it a go with what we had in the house.

Firstly, we already had some pre-mixed bread making flour, that we had already used in the bread maker. We use Laucke bread mixes in 5 kg bags, that are made in Adelaide. The flour was fine, but the loaves always came out a little bit too stodgy for our liking. The bread was not firm inside, and was a bugger to cut into slices smaller than a door stop. However, if you left the bread for a day it was easier to cut. But we wanted to eat it the same day we made it!

On the back of the bread mix bag were suggestions for modifying the recipe for moulded products i.e. bread rolls or pizza dough, so I gave it a go. I measured up 560 gms of bread mix, 370 ml of warm water, and 3 teaspoons of bread making yeast. I placed the ingredients into the bread maker bowl, in the order of water, flour, yeast, set the bread maker to the dough setting and pressed start. The cycle took about an hour and 30 minutes. I think that it has two rising phases in this cycle. Once completed, I took the dough out and placed it on a floured board and let it sit for 10 minutes so it was easier to handle. Then Kim worked her magic.

She cut the dough into eight equal portions, and then did a little kneading thing (she remembered how to do this from somewhere) and then rolled the top of the dough ball into some quick oats (porridge oats) to decorate the tops. She placed the unbaked rolls onto two pizza trays, oat side up, which had been sprayed with canola oil, and I placed warm damp tea towels over the trays. Here are the unrisen rolls.

Of course we couldn’t wait the 5 minute cooling time before sampling a steaming wholemeal roll spread with butter. It was so delicious, and both Kim and I said at the same time, “Why didn’t we try this before!”. We both laughed and kept eating the tasty morsel. Here are the finished rolls. Don’t they look yummy.

Our success has given us the idea of making a hybrid loaf of bread. What I mean by that is, make the dough in the bread maker, and cook the dough in the gas oven in a proper bread tin. Don’t get me wrong, the bread maker cooks a decent loaf of bread, but it doesn’t look like a loaf of bread as it is a very tall loaf with a small top. We are going to give that a go tomorrow. It should be good, if we get the timing right.

Wish us luck!