Home › Sunday Morning Breakfasts › Sweet French Buns
Sweet French Buns
1 cake yeast 1 cup scalded and cooled milk 1 egg 1 tablespoon sugar 4 cups flour 1/4 cup sugar 3 tablespoons shortening 1/2 teaspoon lemon extract 1 teaspoon salt Dissolve yeast in milk, add flour to make ordinary sponge. Beat till smooth. Cover and set aside in warm place to rise for 50 minutes. Add sugar, shortening, beaten egg, extract, about 2 1/2 cups flour, or enough to make a moderately light dough, and salt with flour. Knead till smooth and elastic. Place in greased bowl, cover and set aside to rise in warm place till double in bulk. Takes about an hour. Turn out on board and shape as cloverleaf rolls by forming three small portions into balls and fitting them into muffin pan. Let rise till light, about an hour, then bake in hot oven (425 degrees) for 15 minutes. Makes 2 dozen rolls.
A straightforward sponge-and-dough sweet roll, needing only a few substitutions for a modern pantry. Total time is roughly three and a half hours, nearly all of it rising.
- Cake yeastOne cake of compressed yeast is about 0.6 oz. Substitute 2 1/4 teaspoons (one packet) of active dry or instant yeast. If using active dry, let it stand in the warm milk five minutes before adding flour.
- Milk temperatureScalding is usually explained as deactivating something in raw milk that weakens gluten; with pasteurised milk it is generally considered unnecessary. Warm it to about 105F, roughly what "scalded and cooled" would give you.
- The two sugarsThe list gives both 1 tablespoon and 1/4 cup of sugar, but the method calls for sugar only once. Treat the tablespoon as feed for the sponge and the 1/4 cup as the sweetening added with the shortening; the finished rolls are only lightly sweet either way.
- Flour splitFour cups total, of which about 1 1/2 cups go into the sponge and the remaining 2 1/2 into the dough. Flour absorbency varies, so hold back the last half cup and add it only if the dough stays slack.
- ShorteningThree tablespoons of vegetable shortening or lard was standard. Softened butter works and gives better flavour, though the crumb will be slightly less tender.
- Lemon extractHalf a teaspoon is easy to overshoot. The zest of half a lemon rubbed into the sugar is a cleaner substitute.
- OvenThe stated 425F is correct for the size. Bake 12 to 15 minutes and pull them when the tops are deep gold; cloverleafs dry out quickly past that point.
- Shaping and yieldTwenty-four rolls means three balls of dough per cup in two standard 12-cup muffin tins. Butter the tins well and brush the tops with melted butter as they come out.
Cloverleaf rolls, three balls of dough crowded into a muffin cup so they bake into a pull-apart trefoil, were a fixture of American home baking in the first half of the twentieth century, when pressed-steel muffin tins were common and gas ovens made a reliable hot bake easier. The "French" in the title most likely signals refinement rather than any specific French practice; enriched egg-and-butter rolls of this sort circulated in American cookbooks under a range of names, including French buns, Vienna rolls and Parker House rolls, though the shaping differs between them.