Last year the internet answered a nagging question that vexed me for decades. What makes cinnamon rolls tender? I'm good at making bread so I figured the dough for cinnamon rolls must be sweeter. Immediately upon asking, the internet told me to use mashed potatoes in the dough.
Potato roll dough! That is the trick.
And it's a real trick. Potato rolls make excellent hamburger buns too. Two fundamental things improved greatly with one simple trick.
Butter, jumbo raisins and pecans
Brown sugar and cinnamon
Fresh pineapple, vanilla
7 comments:
You made my day.
yum. Gotta link to the dough recipe?
Potato bread has become my favorite bread in recent years. It has such a satisfying flavor that sometimes I have a plain slice, nothing on it, to tide me over when I'm feeling peckish. A little English lingo there.
Reminds me of how long it's been since I was at a mall.
Apologies, Dicken, no actual recipe with actual measurements.
Okay, fine.
Get the yeast started with EXACTLY 1/4 cup warm water and PRECISELY MEASURED 1 LEVEL teaspoon of yeast, this time with PRECISELY measured 3 tablespoons of sugar for sweet dough and two PRECISELY measured level teaspoons of flour.
The add a medium sized egg.
Then weigh your potato.
Wait. I can't keep doing this. It's too ridiculous even for me.
Peel a potato cut into cubes and boil with salt.
So right there is some of your salt that you must estimate as you go.
Taste your potato cubes as you go to check for doneness and for salt.
Use about half of them.
Enough to fill the cup of your mashed potato squisher. The thing like a lime squeezer except made for potatoes. It comes with discs. Use the one with smallest holes.
I let my potato chunks cool on a plate so they don't kill the yeast that is really going by now. I eat more of the potato chunks as I go because they're so good, and reserve the rest in fresh water, like tofu.
I also save some of the salty starchy boiled potato water
These potatoes are considered water so far as your dough goes. About 3/4 cup was just now added to the original 1/4 cup, that means it will absorb about 2 cups of flour. But the flour is added by rounded tablespoons incrementally until the dough can be picked up and stretched like a pizza.
Add a little more potato water if you want more dough.
Add a little more flour to stiffen wet dough.
Add more salt, enough that goes with however much flour you used.
This is the best I can do with measurements.
The amounts I used were intended for 3 cinnamon rolls.
The 3 filled a bread pan, to about even with its height.
The roll was cut using dental floss. It was rather wet, so it had to be lifted onto the dental floss.
The icing is cups of powdered sugar with tablespoons of milk, with vanilla extract, and teeny-tiny amount of almond extract (an extraordinary harsh ingredient that easily overwhelms everything that it gets close to), say, 1/8 teaspoon or less. It's a ridiculous ingredient.
And I'm really pissed off too. I had a itty-bitty jar of almond extract for three decades until it finally ran out. Then replaced it. Forgot I replaced it and bought another. Now I have 2 tiny bottles of that insane crap.
Apologies. All of my doughs come out a little bit different each time. I cannot measure to save my life. Potatoes are different, eggs are different, flour is different, the day's humidity is different each day. Every recipe you'll ever read fudges on the flour by at least a cup.
And this is not distressing. It's liberating. It frees you to do whatever you wish. The key here is to substitute a portion of flour and water for potato. Reviewers of recipes don't seem to understand so far as measurements go, the potato counts as liquid. Because they complain about having to keep adding more flour. The complainers are surprised they have to compensate with flour for all the mashed potatoes they put in.
If using potato flakes, then incorporate their recipe's water into your dough's (imagined) recipe. Use about half the potato flakes that their recipe calls for so you can replace the absent flakes with flour for your bread.
My imagined recipes start with water. If egg is used, then that is included with water amount. And milk.
1 +1/2 cup will take 3 cups of flour and make a rounded regular bread pan full of bread. That is the basis of all future calculation.
1 cup water + 2 cups flour will make a decent pizza.
By weight, water is 8oz per cup, and a level cup of flour is 4oz. So, by weight, 1 cup water + 2 cups four = 1 LB dough.
A bread pan is about 1 + 1/2 LB of dough.
That's the best I can do with a dough recipe.
Again, in 40 some years of baking all kinds of bread, good grief, I just realized, 50 years, especially sourdough, I haven't managed to bake the same thing twice. But I've come close.
Apologies for inability of being more concrete.
Not a fan of potato rolls...not enough structure, but sheer genius on figuring out how to get the cinnamon rolls right. Mine never had the right texture.
Coincidentally, I put this in my Amazon cart yesterday. For ricing cauliflower to sub for rice. As if.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00V8QXNEA/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?smid=A2U3XBAMXKHMHK&psc=1
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