Be Rough with Your Dough
It can take it.
’m a confident baker, but I still love to hear and awed, “You made that?” from dinner guests and family members. A little ego boost is good for the soul. This weekend, I made a truly spectacular batch of our Kolaches, pudgy sweet breakfast rolls with a cream cheese and jam bulls-eye.
Brought to the U.S. by Central European immigrants in the 1800s, Kolaches are an enriched yeasted bread—the dough includes sugar, eggs, butter and milk—giving the finished bun rich flavor, a lasting springy texture, and a golden hue. We flavor the dough even further with lemon zest, which adds a light and bright fruity aroma. The soft, lemon-scented dough is paired with a dollop of sweetened cream cheese (also boosted with lemon) and a spoonful of your favorite jam. I never have a sweet breakfast, but these Kolaches made me reconsider my own rules.
Be rough with your dough
Sometimes you have to be forceful, especially when working with breads that need to be shaped, dented or poked. Unlike bagels, these Kolaches don’t have a hole in the center, but you do need to make an indentation so the cream cheese and jam have somewhere to sit.
Bread, as you know, contains gluten. Gluten loves to spring back in the oven, and this often leads to any depression or hole you made completely closing up. Since we want the filling to stay in the divot, we must make a firm impression. When we tell you to make a 2-inch wide hollow about as deep as the bun itself, we mean it. Really press down until you can feel the pan just beneath a thin layer of dough. I did not press down firmly enough with some of my buns and you can see the filling is on top of the roll rather than settled inside it. I didn’t hear any complaints from eaters, of course, but depending on the brand of jam you use, you risk it running off the side if you lose the divot.
Why not finish with a flourish?
In the photo above, you can see a crumbly flourish all around the edges of the bun. It’s a simple mixture of flour, sugar and butter pinched together in a bowl until well combined. We list it as optional in the recipe, but personally, I think the crumble is a must. The three-ingredient mixture provides welcome contrast, baking up into small crunchy moments that complement the softness of the treat. Visually, it’s a beautiful accent. With all that pay-off for so little effort, why not?
It’s never a bad time for jammy bakes. Try some of our favorites:
Baking Tip of the Week: So your yeast isn’t instant
Our Kolaches and many of our other bread recipes, like our Garlic-Parmesan Potato Bread Dinner Rolls and Hawaiian Sweet Bread-Style Dinner Rolls, call for instant yeast. Instant yeast is milled to a smaller granule size than active dry yeast, so more surface area is exposed to water at once. This type of yeast will produce a quicker rise, thus reducing proofing time. But what if, like me, you only have active dry yeast?
You’re in luck. You can definitely substitute active dry yeast for the instant yeast measurement, just make some small adjustments. Instant yeast is usually added directly into the dry ingredients—flour, sugar, salt and so on. It will dissolve upon contact with the liquids later. Active dry yeast has a more difficult time dissolving with a small amount of moisture, so you need to activate it, or bloom it, in a larger amount first. This is easy. Just add the yeast to the milk or water that’s being used in the recipe. Wait a couple minutes and give it a stir.
To account for the more vigorous rise of instant yeast, I use slightly more active dry yeast. I do not have an exact measurement for this, but I always scoop slightly rounded teaspoons in these recipes when I use active dry. After blooming it in the liquid measurement, I proceed with the recipe as written.
As usual with bread recipes, be sure never to directly add scalding hot ingredients directly to the yeast mixture. Cool things like scaled milk or melted butter slightly (you should be abe to touch it without burning yourself, around 110°F) to protect the yeast from a fiery death. And, most of all, be patient with your bread.
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Allie Chanthorn Reinmann
Allie Chantorn Reinmann is a Digital Staff Writer for Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street. She’s a Thai-American chef who earned her diploma for Pastry and Baking Arts at The Institute of Culinary Education and worked professionally for over a decade honing her craft in New York City at places like Balthazar, Bien Cuit, The Chocolate Room, Billy’s Bakery and Whole Foods. Allie took her know-how from the kitchen to the internet, writing about food full-time at Lifehacker for three years and starting her own YouTube channel, ThaiNYbites. You can find her whipping up baked goods for cafés around Brooklyn, building wedding cakes and trying her hand (feet?) at marathon running. She’s working on her debut cookbook and lives in Brooklyn, NY.
