Brown and Serve Rolls

 ... extra rolls placed in small bread tins ... let double  in size ...

Billie Bates

(makes 10 dozen small)

18 c. flour (approx., add last)

2 c. milk – scalded

3 c. cold water. Add to scalded milk

4 tsp sugar

4 pkgs. yeast. (each is 1 TB of yeast)

8 eggs well eaten

8 tbsp. butter or oil (1/2 c.)

2 tbsp. salt

12 tbsp. sugar (3/4 c.)

1. Add the sugar and yeast to the milk/water which is luke warm. Let stand 10 min.

2. Beat the last four ingredients together. I use my blender. Then add to the yeast mixture.

... dough has risen ... it was originally half this size ...

... butter pan well ...

Greg Bates’s mother showed me how to make this recipe many years ago. 

She came to my kitchen. 

She coached me as to how soft to make the dough and how long to let it raise before rolling it into buns. 

 As well, she showed me the bun rolling method she had learned when she worked in a bakery. 

“If you practise long enough you will be able to roll with both hands,” she said to me. 

When I got good with one hand, I did try the two handed method, which I will be happy to demo for anyone. 

You just have to get both hands going at the same time, in opposite directions, both rolling in to the centre of your body at the same time.

Billie copied the recipe from the back of a bag of bread and quadrupled it.

I usually get two full pans – the large cookie sheet size or about 70 plus buns. I never make them small enough to get 120 as the recipe suggests.

... cut dough in even chunks and begin to roll ...

On this recipe there is a note as to how Billie turns these into Hot Cross Buns.

Use brown sugar.

Add 3 tsp cinnamon and 1 tsp each of cloves, nutmeg and allspice.

I have a more complicated recipe for Hot Cross Buns so I didn’t ever try her tip on this one.

Laynie and I tried this recipe the day we got together and made three batches of bread.

Why not, we said.

Amir  does a good job and I am done twice as fast.

We are just practising, and if we don’t want to complete any of the recipes, we can just take the dough down and feed it to the fish.

We didn’t have to do that.

I made this recipe again this week – for Michael’s 2nd birthday party for Richard and Miranda were serving pulled pork.

That is when I got the idea that if I took a few pictures it would give you a better idea of how high to let the dough rise and how far apart to put the buns on the large trays.

 ... 3 x 5 card now photocopied with notes added ...

For a long time I I had Billie's recipe on a 3 x 5 card .

Then I photocopied it so that I could have it in a binder that I keep all of my bread recipes in: waffles, pancakes, tortillas, roti, buns, specialty breads, etc.

I try to attached notes now to all of the recipes.

The reason that I have a special binder for Breads, Soups, etc., is that Norma Leavitt and her sisters published a cookbook.

Norma told me that it was so much work and that if you have good recipes, it is a better idea to just put them in a binder and have that book for yourself.

My Bread Binder

 So I began to do that.  Now I have separate binders, one out at the cabin and one here at home.

That is a bit much, for the recipe I want is usually in the binder that is at the other house.

I was wondering about the recipe -- the part that asks a person to scald the milk.  I did a google search  on scalding milk and at http://www.cooksinfo.com/scald I found the following information:

"Howard Hillman, travel and food journalist, writes: "Scalding has two primary purposes: to kill pathogenic microorganisms and to destroy certain enzymes that would keep emulsifying agents in the milk from doing their thickening job. Since those two goals are accomplished when milk is pasteurized at the dairy, scalding need only be done when you use raw (unpasteurized) milk. Many cookbook writers do not know this fact and therefore direct their readers to scald the milk even though it is usually unnecessary today."

I am satisfied that scalding the milk is a step I am not going to take.

Arta