Living Juicy

My great-grandmother used to make these rolls, yeasty, soft, and delicious. They were so good. I don’t have the recipe anymore, but I tried to make them once when I was about 18 or 19 years old. I was pretty excited. She’d passed away when I was 15 and it had been a very long time since they’d been served. I wanted to honor her with her recipe. I worked hard, following the recipe to a T, however something just wasn’t right. My rolls were the right color and smell; however you could build a house with them–hard as bricks.

That was my first attempt with making bread. I wasn’t an experienced cook and I probably messed up either the rise time or the kneading or some miscalculation in measurements. Regardless, I just assumed bread was hard and left it at that and haven’t returned to it in many years.

Last week, after reading a post on the Amateur Gourmet, I decided to try my hand at homemade pizza (including the crust). I found a recipe for the dough at Simple Recipes and it seemed simple enough. While I was at the store picking up the supplied I needed, I realized that the selection of flours was huge and picked out organic whole wheat to make it a more “healthy” pizza.

I have a mixer and thought I had a dough hook, but when I pulled it all out I realized I didn’t. I would not be deterred, but doubt started to creep into my thoughts. I would just make it by hand. I made the dough according to direction, but it didn’t seem to rise very much. I shrugged it off, after all bread is hard. I froze half to dough and made two small pizzas with the other half.

The result, it tasted pretty good, but the crust was dense and a bit like cardboard. No complaint, all the pizza was consumed, cheese covers a multitude of culinary failures. Still, I knew it somehow wasn’t quite right.

Yesterday, I took the left over dough out of the freezer and left it covered on the counter over night. This morning, I peeked under the plastic wrap and it had risen!

It was pillowy, just as it should have been. Perhaps, with whole wheat the rise time is longer, I thought. I punched it down and let it rest another hour. Then I cranked up the oven to 325 and pulled four small balls off and put them in my mini-muffin tin. I placed small pieces of butter on top of the dough and baked it all for about 15 minutes. The result, delicious, little whole wheat rolls. They are still fairly dense, but not tough. They have a nutty sweet flavor and are actually what I would call…good.

And so, now I am strutting around the house eating my little rolls and exclaiming: “I can make bread from scratch. I am a bread maker.”

So, the lesson I learned, if at first you don’t rise to the occasion, perhaps it will take just a bit more time. I think somehow my great-grandmother would be proud.