Home › Recipes › Rolled Oats Rolls
Rolled Oats Rolls
1 pound sifted whole-wheat flour 1 cup raw rolled oats 1 1/4 cups lukewarm water 1 cake compressed yeast 1 1/2 teaspoons salt 1/3 cup sugar 3 tablespoons cooking oil Mix flour and rolled oats. Dissolve the yeast cake in the water; stir in the salt, oil, and sugar. Turn this liquid mixture into the flour and mix to a dough. Knead thoroughly, then proceed as in making other buns. In recipes where quantities are indicated by both weight and measure, the weight is the right amount and is what the measured quantity should weigh. Bran Bread (two small loaves) 1 pint lukewarm water 1 cake compressed yeast 3/4 pound sifted pastry flour (3 cups well shaken down) 1/2 cup oil 1 cup brown sugar, pressed down (6 ounces) 2 teaspoons salt 3 cups bran measured lightly (4 1/2 ounces) 1 cup raisins Dissolve the yeast cake in the water. Stir in the flour and beat well. Set this sponge in a warm place to rise. In about two hours it should be very light and full of bubbles. Then beat together the sugar and oil, and add it and the salt, bran, and raisins (which have been washed and boiled in a little water till plump, then drained) to the light sponge. Beat well together. This will be a soft batter. Do not add flour or bran to make it as stiff as dough. Pour this batter into two oiled bread tins. Allow the loaves to rise about one-eighth inch, then put them in a moderately heated oven to bake. They should bake about three fourths of an hour.
A straightforward whole-wheat yeast dough enriched with oil and sugar; the oats are added dry and soften as the dough rests. The original leaves the shaping and baking to a general instruction elsewhere in the book, so those details are worth filling in.
- Flour by weightOne pound of sifted whole-wheat flour is about 3 1/2 to 4 cups, depending on how it is scooped. The book's own note is the reliable guide: weigh it at 1 lb (454 g) and ignore the cup figure.
- Compressed yeastA cake of compressed (fresh) yeast in household use was commonly about 0.6 oz, though cake sizes varied; that size corresponds to roughly 2 1/4 teaspoons of active dry or instant yeast. Fresh yeast dissolves directly in the lukewarm water; dry yeast can go in the same way.
- Lukewarm means about 100FWater at 100-110F wakes the yeast without harming it. Above about 130F it dies, which is the usual reason a dough like this never rises.
- Raw rolled oats absorb waterThe oats will pull moisture from the dough as it sits, so a dough that feels correct at the end of kneading will stiffen noticeably during the first rise. Let it rest ten minutes after mixing before judging whether it needs a little more water.
- "Proceed as in making other buns"Let the kneaded dough rise until doubled, about an hour in a warm room; divide into 12 to 15 pieces, shape, and let them rise on an oiled pan until puffy, 30 to 45 minutes.
- BakingThe recipe gives no temperature; the page's only oven direction, for the bran bread, is a "moderately heated oven." For rolls of this size, roughly 375-400F for 15 to 20 minutes, until well browned and hollow-sounding underneath, is a reasonable reading. The 1/3 cup of sugar browns the crust faster than a lean dough, so watch the last five minutes.
- YieldAbout a dozen dinner rolls from the pound of flour.
Rolled oats and bran turn up constantly in American cookery of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when whole grains were promoted as much for their supposed effect on digestion as for their flavour. Books in this vein often came out of sanatorium and vegetarian-reform kitchens, which tended to favour oil over butter and lard and to work bran and whole-wheat flour into their breads. The insistence that weight, not measure, is the true amount points the same way: toward a kitchen where the cook was expected to be precise.