Soft rolls (inspired by the Portugese Papo Secos)

I like to look at bread and visit bread blogs. Luckily there are a lot of good blogs on bread. Luckily most of them have good recipes. Some of them have non-fail recipes. You know the recipes you don’t have even have to check.

Yesterday I found an interesting recipe of local bread I wanted to bake for the Bread Baking Day #69. When I added the flour to the water and sourdough it hit me. It was wrong! The description said “very wet dough” and mine was almost dry?? I immediately checked the amounts and 57% is no hydration for wet dough! I did my best to correct it, but it was a failure.

Wisdom for today: next time I check the recipe before I run into my kitchen! J

Yesterday evening I didn’t feed the sourdough and I decided to use dried yeast. I found a nice recipe I used before with 69% hydration. I changed the shape a little bit and here they are: beautiful soft rolls.

This is what I used for 9 rolls:

500 grams of unbleached flour 550, 5 grams sea salt, 5 grams dry yeast, 4 grams sugar, 18 grams olive oil, 346 grams lukewarm water. Soy milk to brush.

This is what I did:
In a bowl I combined 100 grams of flour, yeast, sugar and 246 grams of lukewarm water. Covered it with plastic and placed in a warm place.

When it bubbled enough I added the 300 grams of flour and oil. I added the remaining 100 grams of flour bit by bit until it became consisted dough. This took me about 10 minutes. I checked the dough with the window pane test (take a piece of dough, gently stretch it out until you can see a ‘window’ of thin dough. You can almost see trough it.) The dough is smooth and feels silky.

Transfer the dough to a slightly oiled container and cover with plastic until it is doubled in size, about 1 hour.

Place the dough on a floured counter. Pre shape each roll, of about 100 grams each, and let them rest for 15 minutes.

Shape the rolls. Flatten each roll with your flat hand, make an indent in the middle of the flattened dough with the side of your hand and fold in half on a floured couche with open side down. Cover with tea towel and leave for 5 minutes to rest.

Pre heat the oven to 260˚C.

Place the rolls on parchment paper on a peel, with open side up, and brush with milk. Cover with tea towel and proof for about 30 minutes or until they leave an indent in the dough.

I baked the rolls 20 minutes until the rolls have a nice brown color; this depends on your oven. This time I baked the rolls in the electric oven.

Leave them to cool on a wire rack and enjoy your rolls as we did!

I send this to Susan’s YeastSpotting. Don’t forget to have a look at all those inspiring breads.