You'll Know When You Knead It

MyGirl asked if we could make stromboli for lunch. Stromboli is essentially a rolled up pizza.  Make the pizza dough, shape into a rectangle, put some meat and cheese [and whatever other filling you want to put inside] along the length of the dough, roll the dough up like a swiss roll, then bake.  Unbeknownst to Mai, I agreed because I had wanted to retry the sweet roll recipe and figured we would be able to use the oven heat for lunch AND dessert

I had the pizza dough recipe written down in one of my notebooks, the sweet roll recipe was in one of the tabs in my notebook (laptop), while the real stromboli recipe was in one my cookbooks.

I started off the pizza dough recipe.  I heated the water then sprinkled the yeast over it and added the sugar.   I measured out the required amount of flour and salt into a bowl while waiting for the yeast mixture to bubble.  

I proceeded to turn on the oven.  Since it is winter time and the dough will not rise at room temperature, I learned that if I heat up the oven then turned it off, it will be hot enough inside the oven for the dough to rise. 

As this was happening, I heard the washing machine beep to signal the end of my first load.  Since I was in between stromboli tasks, I hung the clothes and decided to start a second load of laundry. The laundry task took longer than expected so the oven was quite hot when I returned to the kitchen.  The oven was already ready but the dough had not yet been kneaded.

I turned the oven off and quickly made a well in the flour, poured in the yeast then proceeded to knead.  The dough seemed a tad tougher than normal and I wondered whether I had used the wrong measurement of the flour.    I just brushed the thought aside, confident that I had measured the right amount of flour and continued with my kneading.   When it seemed nice and pliable, I put it back in the bowl then placed the bowl in the oven.

With the pizza dough in the oven just waiting to rise, I figured it would be a good time to mix up the dough for the sweet roll.  I asked MyGirl if she wanted to be the one to do the rolls.  When she said yes, I rattled off instructions and let her do the work.  As I was calling out the sweet roll recipe, I realised what was missing in the pizza dough.  I had forgotten to add the oil when I put the yeast mixture into the flour!  No wonder the dough was tough.

I quickly pulled the dough out of the oven, kneaded some oil into it, then stuck it back inside the oven.  (Whew!  Stromboli disaster averted.)

I checked on MyGirl and her sweet roll dough.  I had done this recipe last weekend letting the the dough hooks on our mixer do most of the work and finishing off with manual kneading so I knew that this was a good recipe that gave a nice easy-to-knead dough.

MyGirl knew the drill.  After mixing the dough using the electric mixer, she transferred it to a floured surface and began to knead by hand.

I was talking to her in the background about how important it is to know how the dough is supposed to feel.  I told her that I should have known something was wrong with the pizza dough because it hadn't felt right, and added, "Next time, I will let you see ..." I was going to say, "how it feels," but she completed my sentence with, "the recipe?"

[OK.  I deserved that.]

She seemed to be struggling with the sweet roll dough so although I was about to go off to the butcher to buy the meat to go into the stromboli, I decided to check out her dough myself. I kneaded it a couple of times and found it a bit tough.   I concluded something was definitely wrong.  I knew we'd added the melted butter so it couldn't have been that.  I reviewed the recipe and ... lo and behold ... I had forgotten to add the eggs in the brew.  Yikes!

Back into the bowl went the dough along with two beaten eggs.  MyGirl started over again and by the time she got to the kneading part, she agreed that this batch of dough was a lot easier to handle than the original version.

Thank goodness we caught that problem in time because the main reason I wanted to redo this recipe was because I wanted to get a good batch of sweet rolls going.  Last week, I used most of the dough to make cinnamon rolls but left about a fourth of the dough to make rolls which I divided into twelve, rolled into balls and placed individually into muffin cups.  Wrong call as I ended up with a dozens sweet rocks or at least definitely not the sweet rolls I had imagined.

I wanted to redeem myself this weekend and do it right.  And thankfully, they turned out wonderfully.

 This is just to show you how beautifully the dough had risen inside the oven.

  Here are the sweet rolls fresh out of the oven.

 Obviously these were on the top rack,

And these were on the bottom one.