Baking Adventures: Brötchen (Rolls)

One thing I love about German bakeries are the plain crusty rolls, the Brötchen, that you can get absolutely everywhere. And for a plain white yeast dough product, there are surprisingly many recipes as well as preferences by the consumers.

Now me, I like mine to have a definite taste, a crunchy crust, but a soft and almost doughy inside that's still satisfying and not completely consisting of air. You know, the kind of Brötchen I remember from my childhood, that taste good enough to eat plain and dry, just tearing off pieces and stuffing them in your mouth.

They are surprisingly hard to find in bakeries though, these days.
The closest I've come, strangely, are the ones from one of those in-store supermarket bakeries. Most proper bakeries seem to have too much crust, or are too dry or airy inside. Or just don't taste right.

It's difficult to describe what's so special about the taste of the "right" Brötchen, but it's more than just the taste of wheat. There has to be a bit of sweetness, and a tiny hint of salt.

Purely by accident, I seem to have stumbled on a recipe that works for me the other week. I had made bagels to a recipe I had used before a few weeks ago, and when I tried them, it suddenly hit me that the taste was exactly what I was looking for in rolls. They were obviously, being bagels, more dense and chewy than rolls, but the taste was perfect, and the crust wasn't too bad either.

So I decided to see whether the same recipe (minus the boiling that stops the yeast working in bagels, and thus makes them so nicely chewy and dense) would work for Brötchen too.

I made one minor change in replacing the dried yeast from the original recipe with fresh yeast, and I suspect I need to adjust the amount of water down, as the dough was very sticky, but otherwise I'm pretty satisfied with this first attempt.

Brötchen
makes 15
adapted (and doubled) from BBC Good Food magazine

Ingredients:

• 42g fresh yeast (one pack from a German supermarket)
• 2 tbsp golden caster sugar
• 500-600ml warm water
  
• 4 tsp salt (and I just realised that I only added 2, which would explain why my first taste test seemed a bit sweeter than expected)
• 900g bread flour (strong flour/type 550)

1. Mix the sugar with the warm water in a large bowl and crumble in the yeast. Leave for a few minutes until frothy.
2. Pour the rest of the water into the bowl (this made a very sticky dough for me, so it might be an idea to reduce the water by 100ml), add the flour and salt and mix to a dough.
3. Knead the dough for 10 minutes until it is smooth and elastic. If it is too sticky, it might help to add more flour. I've also found that leaving it to prove briefly (say, for 10 minutes) before kneading also seems to make it easier to handle.
4. Leave the dough to prove for at least an hour until doubled. This can either be in a warm, draft-free place (I find heating the oven to 50°C then turning it off when I put the dough inside creates a good, draft-free place) or in the fridge overnight.
5. Knock back the dough and form into dough balls. Place with the seam down on a generously floured baking tray and cover with a tea towel to rise again for an hour or until at least doubled in size.
6. Preheat the oven as high as you can get it (250°C on mine. I also used a pizza stone to bake the rolls on).
7. Bake the rolls for 15-20 minutes until golden brown. Tap the bottom and check for a hollow sound to make sure they're cooked.
8. Leave to cool.