Home › Bread, Biscuits, Muffins and Waffles › Lunch Rolls
Lunch Rolls
cake FLEISCHMANN'S YEAST 1¼ cups milk, scalded and cooled tablespoonful sugar tablespoonfuls lard or butter, melted Dissolve yeast and sugar in lukewarm milk. Add one and one-half cups flour and beat until smooth, then add white of egg well beaten, lard or butter, remainder of flour, or enough to make a moderately firm dough, and the salt.
Knead lightly, using as little flour in kneading as possible, or "throw and roll." Place in well-greased bowl.
Cover and set to rise in a warm place, free from draft, until double in bulkabout two hours. Mould into rolls the size of walnuts.
Place in well-greased pans, protect from draft, and let rise one-half hour, or until light. Glaze with white of egg, diluted with water. Bake ten minutes in a hot oven.
A straightforward enriched white roll leavened with commercial cake yeast, of the sort promoted in the baking pamphlets of the early twentieth century. The dough is soft and the shaping is the fussiest part.
- YeastA cake of compressed yeast is usually reckoned at about 0.6 oz, equivalent to roughly 2 1/4 teaspoons of active dry or instant yeast, though household cake sizes varied. Compressed cake yeast is still sold refrigerated in some markets but is no longer a pantry staple.
- Milk temperatureScalding is usually explained as denaturing milk proteins or enzymes that weaken gluten; with modern pasteurised milk it is generally held to be unnecessary. What matters is that the milk be genuinely lukewarm, about 100-110F, before the yeast goes in.
- Flour quantityThe original gives no total for the flour, only that one and a half cups goes in first and the rest is added "to make a moderately firm dough." For 1 1/4 cups milk expect somewhere near 3 1/2 to 4 cups of flour, added by feel rather than by measure.
- SaltThe salt is called for at the end of mixing but no amount is stated. For this volume of dough, roughly 1 1/2 teaspoons is a usual proportion. Adding it late, after the yeast has started, does no harm, though the recipe gives no reason for the order.
- "Throw and roll"Probably a term for handling a slack dough by lifting and slapping it down rather than working in more flour; the recipe does not explain it. Keeping the dough soft is the point; a well-floured bench gives dry, tight rolls.
- Hot ovenRead this as 425-450F. Ten minutes is right for walnut-sized rolls at that heat; check at eight, since small rolls colour quickly once the egg glaze sets.
- Egg whiteBeaten egg white goes into the dough and more, thinned with water, brushes the tops. One large white will do both if you reserve a spoonful for the glaze.
- Rising timesTwo hours for the first rise and half an hour for the second assume a warm kitchen. In a modern house at 68F both will run longer; judge by the dough doubling and the shaped rolls looking puffed, not by the clock.
- YieldWalnut-sized pieces from this quantity of dough give roughly two to three dozen small rolls.
Fleischmann's compressed yeast, introduced to a wide American public at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876, changed home baking by making a reliable, fast leaven available in a wrapped cake. The company printed and distributed enormous quantities of recipe leaflets, and formulas crediting the brand by name migrated freely into community and promotional cookbooks. "Lunch rolls" belongs to the era of the hot midday dinner, when small soft rolls were moulded the size of walnuts and served warm from the pan.