Cheesy Dinner Rolls

Cheesy Dinner Rolls

I finally got back to baking. I love baking bread, love working with dough. So getting back to baking makes me happy. One can call bread baking my happy place.

Yesterday was a rainy day here in Northern California. I was planing to make soup, and needed to have a good healthy dinner roll to serve with the soup. Thats why I whipped up this cheesy dinner roll, filled with good seeds and fibers. I used blue cheese in mine because, I had it in my refrigerator, but feel free to use any semi-hard cheese in yours. 

Makes 12 rolls.

Ingredients:

• 375 ml lukewarm water
• 30 g live yeast (2¼ teaspoon dry yeast)
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 350-375 g all-purpose flour
• 150 g whole wheat flour
• 100 g mixed seeds (I used rolled oats, flax seeds, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds)
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 40 ml olive oil
• 200 g blue cheese

Topping:

• egg wash
• mixed seeds

Directions:

In a large bowl (the one for the stand mixer) dissolve (live yeast) sprinkle (dry yeast) over the warm water. If using dry yeast, add the sugar, this will help to wake up the yeast. Let stand for about 5 minutes. Stir in the flour, and stir until just combined. Let the dough rest for about 10-15 minutes. This lets the flour absorb all the water completely, and helps activate the natural enzymes in the flour, and improves the gluten development in the dough.

Add the rest of the ingredients to the dough and knead the dough for about 8-10 minutes, until elastic, add more flour if the dough gets to sticky. 

Let the dough rise for about 60 minutes or until doubled in size. 

Pour the dough unto a lightly floured surface and divide the dough in 16-18 balls. Insert a piece of the cheese into each ball, and make sure to close the dough completely, to prevent any leakage.   Place the balls on a parchment paper lined baking sheet a few inches apart. 

Let the rolls rise for another 30-40 minutes. 

Preheat the oven to 400℉ (200℃).  

Brush the rolls with beaten egg and sprinkle with mixed seeds. Toss about a cup of water in the bottom of the oven when you have put the rolls in the oven, quickly closing the oven door. This will produce steam, and give a better rise to the rolls.

Bake for 30-40 minutes, until deep golden brown.

Let the rolls cool on a wire rack. 

Serve the rolls with dinner.

Enjoy!

Overnight Bread

Overnight Bread

Bread will always be my kryptonite. After a long pause in my bread baking, I started up again with this simple overnight bread. 

Great tasting bread with a good crispy crust. An easier take on a sourdough bread, when you don't have time to bake a Basic Country bread a la Tartine. 

Makes 2 small round loafs.

Ingredients:

• 150 g whole wheat flour
• 500 g all-purpose flour
• 500 ml water
• 5 g live yeast (about ½ teaspoon dry yeast)
• 50 ml sourdough (leaven)
• 15 g salt

Directions:

Leaven:

Feed your sourdough or leaven the night(about 8-10 hours) before you want to start making the dough. 

To test leaven's readiness, drop a spoonful into a bowl of room-temperature water. If it sinks, it is not ready and needs more time to ferment and ripen. If it floats, it's ready to use. As it develops, the smell will change from ripe and sour to sweet and pleasantly fermented.

Bread:

Mix water, yeast, sourdough and whole wheat flour in a stand mixer. Add all-purpose flour and salt, and knead the dough for 10-12 minutes, to build up the gluten in the dough.

Grease a dough-rising bucket  with a thin coat of olive oil. Let the dough rise in the prepared bucket, lid on, for about 90 minutes at room temperature. Place the dough overnight in the refrigerator.

Next take out the dough, and pour the dough on a non-floured kitchen table, divide the dough in 2 and shape them into rounds.

Line 2 baskets with clean kitchen towels, generously dusted with flour. Transfer each round to a basket, smooth side down and let to rest, covered, at room temperature, about 1 hour before baking. Meanwhile preheat oven with the dutch oven to 500℉ (260℃).

Gently flip one bread into heated dutch/french oven. Score top twice using a razor blade matfer lame. Cover with lid. Return to oven, and reduce oven temperature to 450℉(235℃). Bake for 20 minutes.

Remove lid and continue to bake until crust is deep golden brown, 20 to 25 minutes more.

Transfer loaf to a wire rack, and let it cool completely.

To bake the second loaf, raise oven temperature to 500℉ (260℃), wipe out dutch/french oven with a dry kitchen towel, and reheat with lid for 10 minutes. Repeat the bake.

Enjoy!

2 Kinds of Hveder - Wheat Rolls

Toasted rolls - ristede hvedeknopper

Even though I'm a expat, I do celebrate Danish Holidays. This gives me (almost) double-up on holidays, the more the merrier 😃

Store Bededag or Prayers Day is coming up on Friday. According to traditions everybody had the day off on Store Bededag even the bakers. You were actually meant to stop all work, play, travels and all games. To make up for not being able to get any fresh bread on Store Bededag, the bakers made an abundance of hvedeknopper (wheat rolls), to tie people over. And the tradition of eating the toasted hvedeknopper the night before Store Bededag was born. Ok people was meant to save the rolls to the next day, but who can resist a fresh-baked roll?

Hveder is one of my favorite rolls. The soft, sweet, fresh baked cardamom roll is so delicious served with some butter. Most people toast the rolls, but I prefer them not toasted. 

Here are my recipes for Hveder:

Traditional Hveder - hvedeknopper:

Hveder - sweet rolls

Grove hveder - 3-Grain sweet rolls:

Toasted 3-grain rolls - ristede grove hvedeknopper

Starting a Sourdough

I often use sourdough in my baking. Personally I think that a young sourdough gives bread a nice delicate taste, and a chewy  crumb. You might think that sourdough breads are very acidic, and the San Francisco kind is very acidic. Too acidic to my taste. But after tasting Basic country bread from Tartine, I knew, I had to bake this mild sourdough bread. My relationship with sourdough started there and then.
Initially I bought a sourdough online to get started right away. Maybe because I thought it would be difficult to make your own. But now I do believe, that I need a recipe for sourdough here on my blog. 

I started up a new sourdough after Claus Meyers recipe. Meyer has been a pioneer in the Danish kitchen. And right now he is trying to build up a Danish/Nordic style bakery restaurant at Grand Central Station i New York. His bakery is already among the 12 best bakeries in NY according to Zagat. 

Here is how to start a sourdough from scratch.

Ingredients:

• 350 ml (1½ cup) water
• ½ cup all-purpose flour
• ½ cup whole wheat flour
• ½ cup dark rye flour

Directions:

Mix all the ingredients in a plastic jar, make sure you don't have any lumps in the "batter." Let the sourdough sit on the kitchen counter for 4-5 days, with the lid loosely placed on top. Whisk the "batter" 1-2 times every day. 

After the 4 days the batter is starting to bubble and get an acidic smell, this means that the sourdough is ready to use. If the batter isn't sour yet, let it sit on the counter for another 1-2 days. 

Now you have a few options. Do you want to have your sourdough living on the kitchen counter? This is recommended if you bake every day or every other day. You need to feed the sourdough every 5-6 days, and you need to bake with the sourdough the first 8-24 hours after the feeding*.

You can keep your sourdough in the refrigerator in between feeding, this is recommended if you do not bake with it all the time. Read more about keeping and feeding a sourdough here: Sourdough - Keeping and Feeding.

* Feeding: take ½ cup sourdough (discard the rest), ½ cup all-purpose flour, ½ cup whole wheat flour and 1 cup water. Mix it well and let it sit covered on the kitchen counter for minimum 8 hour before using. 

3-Grain Sourdough Rolls

3-Grain Sourdough Rolls

I had to try to make 3-grain sourdough rolls, and they turned out great. 

Makes 8

Ingredients:

• 4 tablespoons mature sourdough (fed and fermented for about 8 hours*)
• 300 ml water
• 350 g all-purpose flour
• 50 g whole wheat flour
• 50 g flaxseeds 
• 50 g rolled rye 
• 40 ml cream or milk
• 10 g salt

Sprinkles:

• sesame seeds 

Directions:

Dissolve the sourdough in the water in  a large plastic bowl. I used a dough-rising bucket. 

Mix in the rest of the ingredients. You just have to mix the dough until all the flour is wet. Let the dough ferment in the bucket, lid on, on the kitchen counter overnight or 7-10 hours.

Gently pour the dough onto a well floured surface. Fold the somewhat wet dough into it self until the surface is firmed up, and the surface got a good tension. Divide the dough in 8 (about 100 g pr roll), roll the dough into a round ball, brush the dough with water and dip it in sesame seeds. Place the rolls on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.

Let the rolls rise for 30-60 minutes, loosely covered with plastic wrap. I raised my rolls in my oven on the proof-setting.

Preheat the oven to 450℉ (230℃).

Place the rolls on the lower rack in the oven. Splash about ¼ cup of water in the bottom of the oven, and close the oven quickly. You need the steam to get the best oven spring and crust. Bake the rolls for about 22 minutes, until golden.

Let the rolls/rundstykker cool before serving.

Enjoy!

*To test the readiness of the sourdough, drop a spoonful into a bowl of room-temperature water. If it sinks, it is not ready and needs more time to ferment and ripen. If it floats, it is ready to use.