Home › Recipes › Genuine Vienna Rolls
Genuine Vienna Rolls
4 pounds of flour. 1 quart of milk. 1 ounce of German compressed yeast. 1 ounce of salt. 1 tablespoonful of sugar, Make the milk lukewarm and dissolve the yeast in it. Set sponge at 9 in the morning, at noon add the salt and sugar and make up stiff dough. Let rise till about 4. Then work the dough well on the table by pressing out and folding over.
Roll out the dough in one large sheet as thin as you can, which will be about the thinness of a dinner plate edge; then measuring with your hand cut the dough into strips or bands as wide across as your hand is long. Cut these again into triangular pieces for rolls, not equal sided but long and narrow triangles. Roll these triangular pieces up, beginning at the broad bottom end, and the point will come up in the middle, and there will be a spiral mark around from end to end.
Give each roll a few turns under the hands to smooth it and place it on the baking pan in the form of a crescent-just the shape and size of the new moon. Brush over with water. Let rise in the pans about half an hour and bake about ten minutes.
Some time ago the writer saw a Vienna Model Bakery-so called-begin and flourish awhile, and at last go into bankruptcy in an attempt to introduce and make the above described rolls popular in a community that had but little appreciation of their excellence. For one thing it cost the firm $2.50 per week for compressed yeast alone, to arrive on certain days by express, when they might have made the common kind at a scarcely appreciable cost. The lesson is: German bread for the Germans, but Vienna rolls cannot be forced into the position of favoritism that is held by Parker House or Albany rolls, or split rolls by any other name Make the Vienna shape, however, out of French roll dough. Brush over the sheet of dough with a little melted butter, then roll up the rolls, and after baking they can be unrolled, and the people who eat will admire them.
A working bakery formula written for someone who already knows how bread behaves, with no oven temperature and a clock-based schedule tied to a baker's day. The numbers are sound; only the yeast and the oven need translating.
- Scale it downFour pounds of flour is roughly 14 cups and yields about 6 1/2 pounds of dough — around 50 rolls at two ounces each. Quartering the whole formula (1 lb flour, 1 cup milk) gives a manageable dozen.
- German compressed yeastThis is fresh cake yeast. One ounce of it corresponds to about one-third of an ounce of instant or active dry, roughly 3 teaspoons, dissolved in the lukewarm milk as directed. Fresh yeast still exists but is a special order; the dry equivalent behaves the same here.
- The salt is not a misprintOne ounce of salt to four pounds of flour is about 1 1/2 tablespoons, roughly 1.5 percent of the flour weight — a little under the 2 percent a modern lean bread formula usually calls for. Measure it by weight rather than eyeballing.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given at all. Ten minutes for a small roll implies a hot oven — in a modern range, somewhere around 450F. Bake on a preheated stone or heavy sheet and throw a little steam in for the first few minutes.
- Brushing with waterThe water wash is doing the work of steam: it keeps the surface supple so the roll expands, then sets into a thin crisp crust. Do not substitute egg wash if you want the genuine Vienna finish.
- The scheduleSponge at nine, dough at noon, shape around four — seven hours on a baker's clock. In a 70F kitchen expect it to run longer; judge by the dough, and note that the final proof is only half an hour.
- Rolling and shaping"As thin as a dinner plate edge" is about 1/8 inch. Cut long narrow triangles, roll from the broad end, then bend into a crescent — this is kipferl geometry, and the spiral seam should finish on top and centred so it does not unwind.
- The butter variation at the endThe closing suggestion — brush the sheet with melted butter before rolling up — is what makes the layers separate after baking. It is the step that turns a plain crescent into something a customer will unroll and admire.
Vienna bread was the prestige loaf of the later nineteenth century, and American bakers spent decades trying to reproduce it. The fascination is usually traced to the Vienna Bakery exhibits at the international fairs of the 1870s, where visitors met both the crisp steam-baked Viennese roll and the compressed fresh yeast that made it possible; commercial compressed yeast reached American bakers in quantity in roughly the same years. The crescent shape described here is the Austrian kipferl, often said to be the ancestor of the croissant, though this dough is lean — milk, flour, salt, a spoon of sugar — with butter offered only as an afterthought in the final paragraph. What makes the entry unusual for a recipe book is the aside that follows it: the author has watched a "Vienna Model Bakery" fail, and blames $2.50 a week in express-shipped yeast and a public loyal to the soft Parker House roll. It is a candid note on the economics of perishable yeast before local supply, and on how slowly American bread habits changed.