I Rolled With It - 2/25/09

One of the articles in the February 2009 issue of Gourmet contained 6 recipes for yeast rolls. For better or worse, tonight I finished making every one of those recipes. I remain adamant in my belief that one of the hardest things to make well are yeast breads. Yeast breads seem simple, just yeast, flour and a liquid of water or milk make up the base for all of these breads. But in my mind, nothing could be more difficult to truly get right. Did you let the yeast foam enough? Did you knead too little or too much? Did you let the bread dough rise the correct amount? As I read back over the 5 other posts from this article, I see that each time something was not quite right. I really enjoyed making each roll recipe but I still need to perfect the art of bread making. Tonight, I made the Rye Walnut Rolls on page 87. One of the first lessons I should have learned was to not mess with the recipe. I ran out of white flour today and had only 2 cups left for a recipe that called for 5 1/2 cups of white flour. Instead of running to the store mid-recipe, I used a 50/50 wheat blend to make up the difference. I gather wheat flour absorbs more liquid than white because the dough was extremely dry when I went to knead it. I added some milk and this helped the dough hold together. The rolls rose well and looked fine but either because of the dry dough or the additional wheat flour, they were a little heavy. Good, but very dense.
The rolls were a good accompaniment to the Tunisian Soup with Chard and Egg Noodles on page 71. The rolls may have been dense but they made great soup soakers and this was a good soup. I was pleased with how easy and flavorful the soup was. I suppose now is a good time to tell my secret to chicken stock when I haven't had time to simmer chicken parts for hours. I use that chicken bullion powder and have used that in place of chicken stock in all but 2 of the recipes that called for chicken stock. I think it works great and at around $2.50 for 30 cups of chicken stock, the price can't be beat. This was the one soup I thought I might regret using the "fake" stuff, but I was very pleased with the flavor. I think the harissa sauce was a strong enough flavor to hide any difference between actual stock and my easy substitute. Another surprise was how much I enjoyed the chickpeas in the soup. I've mentioned before that my mom made hummus as a kid and I hated it. Ever since then, I've had no luck with chickpeas myself. I now enjoy store bought hummus that is smooth and highly seasoned but I always felt that anything I made with chickpeas had that gritty bland taste I hated as a kid. Maybe canned chickpeas have just gotten better but I loved the chickpeas in this soup and so did Eyrleigh. They were the only part of the soup she would eat. I think the seasoning had absorbed into the noodles too much for her liking.