Buttermilk Rolls from Amanda Cooks and Styles

Buttermilk Rolls - made January 4, 2025 from Amanda Cooks and Styles

1 cup buttermilk, heated to 105-115 degrees F

1/2 cup whole milk, heated to 105-115 degrees F

2 teaspoons active dry yeast

1/4 cup granulated sugar

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

Egg wash

1 egg

1 tablespoon milk

1. In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the dough hook, add warm milk and yeast. Let sit for 10 minutes to allow yeast activation.
2. Add buttermilk, sugar and salt. Beat with dough hook on medium speed to mix. Add 2 cups of flour and baking powder and knead for a few minutes. Add remaining flour and knead until a smooth and soft ball forms.
3. Place ball of dough in a lightly oiled bowl and cover with a towel. Let rise in a warm place for 1-2 hours or until dough doubles in size.
4. Roll the dough into a long log about 12 inches long. Cut into 12 equal pieces and roll each piece into a smooth ball. Transfer to a parchment lined baking sheet. Cover with a towel and let rise another hour or so until double in size.
5. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. In a small bowl, whisk 1 egg and 1 tablespoon milk. Baste tops of rolls with egg wash.
6. Bake rolls for 13-15 minutes until tops are golden. Remove from oven and let cool to lukewarm. Enjoy with fresh butter.

It's been a long time since I've made a yeasted bread without using my breadmaker and you can tell by my rather amateurish shaping of these rolls. I'd be embarrassed if I was actually a bread baker but I'm really not. I love bread. I love it so much that I don't make it. If that sounds counterintuitive, I can also tell you I love chips but I rarely buy them because I would eat the whole bag, likely in one sitting. There are just some things you have to protect yourself from; overeating your best comfort foods is one of them.

So I rarely make bread and therefore am considerably rusty at it. Truth be told, I didn't try that hard to make these that pretty either since I knew I would be the one eating most of them. And I care more about taste than appearance. Good thing, right?

Although many ovens have a proof setting (mine doesn't) and people have countertop proofers (I don't), nothing beats the old-fashioned method my mom always used when she made bread in my formative years. Namely, she put the bowl of bread for the first rise and later the shaped rolls for the second rise on the center rack of an oven that was turned off, had a shallow baking pan on the bottom rack beneath the bread and she would pour boiling hot water into the shallow pan. Steam and warmth would fill the oven. She would close the oven door and let the bread rise in the warm, damp oven space, sometimes replenishing the hot water with another pour later on if the dough hadn't risen as much as she wanted.

That's how I did both the first and second rise for these rolls. Then I took the risen, unbaked rolls out, removed the shallow pan of water, wiped down the oven and turned it on to preheat. Then baked.

Although I egg-washed these as the recipe directed, the tops didn't brown as much as the bottoms. I was afraid of underbaking them, mostly because I've been binge-watching the Great British Bake Off and had nightmare visions of Paul Hollywood poking at my bread rolls, telling me they were underproved and underbaked. So I ended up baking these a little longer than I normally would, going (erroneously?) more on how much the tops had browned rather than the bottoms.

Still, they weren't burned or overbaked. They didn't quite have the taste of buttermilk but these were still pretty good, soft rolls. They would've been softer if I hadn't baked them for so long but still, it's hard to beat soft, fluffy rolls smothered in melty butter.  If I make these again, I would make the rolls smaller and more uniform, be more generous with the egg wash and not bake them as long. You want the bottoms to be a lighter brown than what I had above.