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Sour Dough Rolls
Form bread dough into rolls, lay in greased pans and let rise. Bake 15 minutes in very hot oven. Or, grease your Dutch oven and let rolls rise directly in that, then bake like Dutch Oven Bread.
A shorthand entry that assumes you already have sourdough bread dough proofed and ready; it covers only the shaping and the bake.
- "Very hot oven"In period oven tables that generally means somewhere around 450-500F. At that heat, dinner-size rolls take roughly 12-18 minutes; the recipe's own 15 minutes sits in that range. By modern practice, pull them when the crust is deep brown and the internal temperature reads about 200F.
- Sourdough rise timesA wild-yeast dough shaped into rolls will generally take considerably longer to double than a commercial-yeast dough, often a couple of hours or more at warm room temperature, though it depends heavily on the starter and the room. The recipe gives no time; judge by volume and a slow spring-back, not the clock.
- Dutch oven methodFor the second option, bank coals under and over the lid — roughly a third beneath, two thirds on top — to approximate a hot oven. Rotate the pot and the lid a quarter turn in opposite directions every few minutes so the rolls do not scorch on one side.
- Letting them rise in the potThis works because the cast iron holds the dough's warmth, but it also means the pot is cold going into the fire. Expect a few minutes longer than a preheated bake, and grease generously, as the recipe directs.
- SpacingRolls set close enough to touch will rise upward and stay soft-sided; spaced an inch apart they crust all over. In a Dutch oven, leave room at the wall so the sides do not burn.
- YieldThe recipe specifies no quantity, since it assumes a batch of bread dough already made. As a rough guide, a dough from about 6 cups of flour would give somewhere in the region of 18 to 24 dinner-size rolls, more than a single Dutch oven would take at once.
Sourdough was a working leaven of the American West before packaged yeast was widely available on the trail: a starter kept in a crock or lard pail could be fed with flour and water indefinitely, which mattered when resupply was weeks away. The habit carried into Alaska gold-rush camps thoroughly enough that "sourdough" became a nickname for an old hand. The instruction to let the rolls rise in the greased pot itself makes practical sense in camp, where one vessel could serve as proofing box, oven and serving dish.