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Plain Rolls (Bread Dough)
¼ cup bread dough ½ cup butter 1 cup sugar 1 cup lukewarm milk Pinch of salt Five Roses flour to make stiff dough.
Knead 20 minutes and put in a warm place to rise. Knead again very little, roll out and cut with biscuit cutter. Place in baking pan, let rise again and bake.
This is a rich roll raised entirely on a cup of already-fermented bread dough, with no separate yeast, so the timings depend on how lively that dough is. Almost every quantity that matters is left to judgment, and the oven is not mentioned at all.
- The cup of bread dough is the leavenThere is no added yeast. You need a cup of active, risen white bread dough taken from a batch already underway; a stiff sourdough starter behaves similarly but ferments more slowly. Without it the recipe cannot rise at all.
- Flour quantity is genuinely open"Flour to make stiff dough" with a cup of milk, half a cup of butter and a cup of sugar lands somewhere around 4 to 4½ cups, but sugar and butter both soften a dough, so add the last cup gradually. Aim for a dough that is firm enough to roll but still slightly tacky.
- Lukewarm means under 110FWarm the milk to blood heat and no more, and melt the butter separately so it is not hot when it meets the dough. Heat above about 120F will damage the yeast in your bread dough.
- Twenty minutes of kneadingThat figure assumes hand kneading of a heavy sweet dough with no stand mixer. Eight to ten minutes by hand, or five to six on a mixer's dough hook, develops the same gluten. The dough should pull into a thin translucent sheet.
- Rising timesNone are given. Expect 2 to 3 hours for the first rise at room temperature, longer than a plain dough because the sugar and fat slow fermentation, and about 45 minutes to an hour for the shaped rolls once cut.
- Rolled and cut, not shapedRolling the dough about ¾ inch thick and cutting with a biscuit cutter gives straight-sided rolls; place them touching in the pan so they climb rather than spread. Scraps rerolled once are fine, twice makes them tough.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven heat or time at all. Around 375F for 15 to 20 minutes suits them. The sugar means they brown well before the centres set, so watch the colour and pull them when a roll sounds hollow tapped underneath.
- "Plain" is relativeA full cup of sugar puts these closer to a modern sweet roll than a dinner roll. Reduce to ¼ cup if you want something to serve with soup, and expect a slightly faster rise when you do.
- YieldAbout 18 to 24 rolls from a 2½-inch cutter.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg as advertising for its Five Roses brand flour, and its recipes were largely solicited from Canadian housewives, which is why the same book will give one contributor's exact ounces and the next contributor's "flour to make stiff dough." This roll belongs to a whole family of turn-of-the-century recipes built on a cup of dough begged from the day's bread batch: in a house where bread was set two or three times a week, a piece of risen dough was ready to hand, and enriching it with butter, sugar and milk turned everyday bread into something for the tea table. Commercial compressed yeast is generally said to have been widely sold in Canada by around this period, though the older habit of carrying a dough forward seems to have continued in home baking alongside it.