Kaiser Rolls

So for Kaiser rolls, you start with this concoction that I swear looks like you're making a witches brew. It's dark brown and bubbly, and frankly smells weird.

I added 2 packets of yeast to warm water and sugar and let it sit for 5 minutes. Looks like this:

Then I added oil, salt, sugar, more water, and lots of flour. Now the recipe calls for all purpose flour, but apparently the flour gnomes visited last night and made off with a bag of flour I swear I had.

Since Kaiser rolls are bread, I figured, okay, I can probably use bread flour. Hopefully I'm right about this and they will be awesome and not hockey pucks. (eek!)

The dough is sticky when you get done mixing, but it's kind of a pleasure to have it suddenly become dough, and a soft one. Easy mixing, if you get my drift. Not like cookies where you need someone else's arm to mix for a while.

I put the dough down on a floured table.

I have to make a side note here. They tell you in the recipe to put 4 of the 6 cups of flour in the mix, and then use the other two in the kneading process.
Amazingly, they are right on, I needed to add and add and add flour as I mixed.
By the way, 6 minutes is a LONG time to knead. But again it was a silky elastic dough, and fun to work with.
I may becoming a bread making addict! Ahh, warm rising bread dough.....

What was I doing? Oh yeah.

So now you have to let it rest after all that wrestling, so you put some kind of "grease" in the bowl ( I had oil on hand already so I used that) and roll the dough around so it's all greased. Then you cover it. With what you ask? It didn't say. Well that's weird.

So looking around at other bread recipes, they tend to put some kind of plastic (one even calls for plastic bags, I'm not kidding!) so I used saran wrap but didnt put it on too tight. I dont want explosions.

I'm half hour into the hour of the Rising, and it has filled the bowl. Hmm.

Ooh you should see it now, in fact, take a look:

Its like poofy marshmallow and it smells so good.

Next step is to punch it down, really  just knead it a bit. Then I cut it into 16 kind of equal balls and tried to make them somewhat pretty.

Then put an egg white with some water and whisked it until it started to foam. This I washed over the tops of the dough balls.

Since I have a lot of sesame seeds left from a previous Indian treat, I used those, but you can use poppy seeds or none if you dont like them.

The timer just went off, so as soon as my cupcakes are done I can bake these. Yum, they are going to be good!


Ok they are in the oven. At 325 F ,but i just realized about 8 mins in, they should be at 400 F. Oops.
See, from being a klutz, I already know that if I turn the oven up, it will burn the bread now, since the heating up to a temperature process is to go full blast.

So I took them out and am letting the oven heat up. For I dunno, 5 minutes maybe.

And this seemed to fix the problem, although I'd just keep it at 350 F and go a little longer. 400 tends to burn.

Just look at these awesome rolls!

Dinner tomorrow is gonna be great!

Stay tuned...

Vicky aka The Clumsy Chef