At the moment I stay often very long in the lab to finish the missing Experiments of my thesis. Around late afternoon/ early evening I often get hungry when lunchtime was already 5 hours ago. And when I am hungry and tired I am lacking motivation and concentration. That’s not good if I plan to work another two hours!

To prevent this I baked some wholewheat almond-honey crescents for the coming week. The original Idea is from “Das große GU Vollwert-Kochbuch”  but I changed the recipe so much in the last years that you can not recognize the original recipe anymore. I use more liquid and less yeast, I removed the soybean flour from the recipe and added a sourdough. The filling contains less butter, cinnamon and eggs but additional cacao and a pinch of salt.

I like the result very much: Delicious, filling with enough honey to give me a little more power. The long days in lab can come, I’m prepared now!

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And now the next recipe for people like me, who like to eat fresh rolls for breakfast without getting up very early in the morning.

This time its very easy, with yeast, water, salt and spelt flour.

The spelt flour and the long fermentation gave a very delicious taste to the rolls. The dough was rather wet, but with some flour I could handle it good and that a wet flour has positive results on the crumb I could already hear when I drew them out of the oven. The rolls crackled and sing and when I cut them I had a open crumb halfway to the open crumb of a ciabatta. They taste very good still warm with orange marmalade or cold later the day with some cheese and lettuce.

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There is not always space in my fridge for trays with rolls. Ok, to be honest there is nearly never room for a tray in my fridge. Even when I put two proofing baskets in the fridge I have to be creative. Normally I start to stack things on each other to make room for the baskets. And when my boyfriend wants to eat some cheese in the night? Then it’s time for Jenga!

That’s why I like recipes which I can keep overnight at room temperature . And since I bake the saffron stars I knew that I can even proof rolls overnight at room temperature as long as I use a really small amount yeast. So 1 g fresh yeast in the bagel recipe is no mistake. To improve the taste I also add a little bit sourdough. I did not dare to use a higher amount of sourdough, being afraid that the long and relatively warm fermentation  would turn the dough into sourdough.

But with the small amount it worked very well and the next morning I just had to place the bagels in boiling water and bake them. That’s only 30 min in the morning till we had fresh bagels for breakfast.

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I was very sad when Martin from Pain de Martin posted this summer that he would stop blogging. I liked Martins Ideas very much and his recipes often inspired me to my own recipes.

And so I was very happy when I saw some days ago that he started his new blog Lite mer bröd.  When I read the new entries I found directly one I wanted to try: long fermented saffron buns with an orange filling.

I decided to try a variation of this recipe for breakfast on Christmas. So I skipped the filling and reduced the sugar amount. For kneading I do it like I do all sweet dough: I knead the dough until medium gluten development without sugar and butter. Then I add the sugar gradually and at the end the butter. That yields a dough with a good developed gluten network because sugar and butter cannot interfere with it.

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Krustis are wheat rolls which get a vey crisp crust because of their form which cause their crust to crack unregulary in the oven.

The rolls are very easy to form and they look very nice.

I choosed a similar recipe for my variation of Krustis as I used for the “Normal rolls”. But this time I add more Butter to the dough and this higher fat content makes the crumb softer. I think I come closer to my ideal roll!

The poolish and the fact that the dough rise slowly overnight give the rolls a very nice complex taste.

This rolls have the potential to become my new favourite Breakfast rolls.

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In the different regions of Germany plain rolls have different names: In the north they are called “Rundstücke”, in the South “Semmeln” or “Wecken” and in the East they are called “Schrippen” or “Doppelte”, and in the West, were I live, we call them “Brötchen”. But as a friend who has to travel a lot told me some days ago, as long as you asked for “Normal” you will get what you want in every bakery.

I still try to create rolls with a fluffy and soft crumb. I will not give up this aim, someday I will get the ingredients in the perfect ratio like it work for the sandwich bread, too.

My newest attempt include some egg white, a little bit of milk and butter. I used some Pâte fermentée and knead until the gluten is fully developed.  The crumb is already much better then before, it is evenly regulary and softer then before, but not as soft as I whished for. The rolls proofed nicely and had a good oven spring. Pulling them out of the oven they started directly to “sing” when the crust cracked because of the soft crumb which shrink when the bread cool down.

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The bakery in the small village in which we spend our vacation in East Frisia offered little braids made of a slightly sweet dough. They taste great with jam or honey or as a sandwich with cheese.

The kitchen of our small holiday home contained a oven. So I brought the most important things for baking with me: scale, bowl and my hands . And I tried to recreate the recipe for the little braids to take a little bit of our holiday memories back home.

I decided to use Pâte Fermentée as a preferment and a water roux for a fluffy crumb.

To make kneading more easy (I left the kitchen machine at home) I let the dough rest after mixing it together for 30 min – during this Autolysis the proteins in the dough are hydrated and developing a nice gluten network is then more easy.

The little braids are delicious – slightly sweet like the original and with a fluffy crumb.

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Since I baked the Yoghurt Sesame Rolls the first time I think about how to change the recipe so that the overnight method would work for sweet rolls, too. Normally I add some eggs to my sweet rolls dough, but to keep a dough with egg overnight at room temperature was too risky in my eyes. And so I decided to try a modified sweet roll recipe using buttermilk. Buttermilk is rich on lecithin same as egg yolks which is positive for the dough development.

Folding the dough develops the gluten network nicely and makes the crumb fluffy and soft. The crust is soft, too like a good sweet roll should be. The rolls gain flavour due to the long fermentation even without adding a preferment and the rather low hydration makes them easy to shape so that this recipe is ideal for beginners in bread baking.

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I don’t like it when I have left overs in the fridge. They tend to grow old and after some days I will throw them away. And I don’t like to throw away food! Normally I plan our meals so that we eat everything or that the left overs are enough to be packed as lunch at work on the next day. But this saturday there was some potatoes left. Nothing else, only potatoes. And we had a invitation for Lunch the next day, so cooking something with something with them was out of question.

I inspected the fridge and found following things: Some Pâte fermentée, made because I wanted to bake something but without any recipe in mind, a cup of buttermilk and as I told before, potatoes. Looking on these things I had a Idea at last: I would bake some nice rolls for breakfast on Sunday.

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Baguette spread with garlic or herb butter is a must have at a barbecue for me. But on the other hand eating always the same things is a little bit boring, too. So I take the challenge to find something that is new and exiting for our big family barbecue this weekend.

Susan baked Pesto Fan Rolls some years ago. Something like this would be great. But I wanted something without cheese and nuts, to keep it on the lactose free and few histamine side. And so I puree some basil, parsley and garlic with oil to a beautiful green paste and spread this paste between the dough layers. For the dough I used some Poolish to add aroma and let the rolls rise in the fridge overnight.

The next morning I only had to bake the rolls -  that’s perfect for days with less or no time to bake.

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