The Rolls I love for Sandwiches

Confession
When I first starting writing this blog, I wanted to start out by saying I wasn’t always a baker and I only picked up these skills in the recent years. This would not be a true statement. I have been a baker most all of my life, I just chose different professions along the way and had some gaps in time when baking wasn’t at the forefront of my thinking. When I was a kid and baking pies, or whipping my first meringue by hand, I defined myself as a baker.

I am a baker and I always have been a baker. I just needed the right amount of seasoning (life) to get me to where baking became my priority.

Why do I tell you this? It is simple. Only you can define what you are, what you want to be, and how you act accordingly. If at an early age you started surfing and continued to do it for thirty years, even though you never got good, you would not say you are not a surfer. Just because you did not get good enough to join the pro-circuit you would not say you are not a surfer. You are a surfer, and riding the waves that fulfill your dreams, no matter which diverged road you took, or take.  I say this because many, many people are afraid of baking bread, and baking in general. To work as a professional, it takes more than simple ingredients of course, but, knowing I could do it makes it clear to me that you can too.

Today you are going to read about my favorite bread roll. Four or five simple ingredients like most breads have, along with some time, patience, and love, you will be guided to baking amazing rolls, and you can add baker to your resume of life.

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What is it that makes a sandwich roll memorable? There are many different types of breads used by different places. What I think is important are two things about eating hoagies (subs to the Northerners) or parmesans (usually a long roll with a red sauce along with whatever ingredients put inside; one, that the sandwich as a whole is what fulfills your expectations, and two, you think to yourself, damn that bread was good.

Growing up and always remembering the different breads I recall most hoagie shops like White House in Atlantic City, or the parm shops in Philly, is that their breads on their own were not memorable. Do not get me wrong, the experience at White House is what makes them stand out, but they use the same bread most every other sandwich shop is using. I understand the reasoning for this too. A place like White House probably turns 500 sandwiches a day and they cannot bake that much bread so they rely on a baker to provide it to them. That baker is probably baking twenty times that amount and supplying other businesses. I should note, I have not confirmed this with White House, it is just my guess.

But, every once in a while, you will stumble across a sandwich shop that makes a hoagie or a parm, or something else on a roll that leaves you remembering more than the experience, you leave remembering the bread.  That is what I am after every time. For me, it is all about the bread. I want that crunchy outside with a crust that is baked to perfection, slightly dusted from flour, a few cuts across the top, allowing it to breathe, and an inside that you cannot forget, chewy, almost sticky, and melting in your mouth.

It is without question, I believe, the French are most famous for baking a bread like this. In essence it is a mini baguette.  An interesting piece of information I found while doing research for this blog post is that the man who invented the modern-day baguette is the same man who invented the croissant. I cannot say if this is true or not but for certain the use of a steam oven is what has given these breads their classic crust and crumb.  This is a practice I put to use one hundred percent of the time when I am baking breads. Even if I do not want a crusty bread, but instead a soft burger roll, I always use steam in the oven.

So, what is this steam I am talking about and why do I insist it is so important. There are generally three ways to introduce steam into your baking: One, your oven is hooked up to water somewhere and it will allow misted water into the air inside of your oven, two, you can put a pan in your oven with water in it, or three, have a squirt bottle handy and every few minutes for the first part of the bake, you open the oven and squirt. Not everyone is lucky enough to have a steam oven, especially in-home ovens. If you are one of the lucky ones who does, please let me know when I can come over and play and we can bake an assortment of breads. In my bakery my oven was a steam oven and I loved it but my oven also had a fan that didn’t listen so well so even with the steam I never had enough water and supplemented it. That is a story for another day.

In your home oven, I recommend having a tray of water for your steam. At the time I turn my home oven on is the same time I will put a pan in the bottom, one that is capable of holding water, and certainly not glass. You dump water into a 300c glass plate and you will have serious problems in an instant so please never use glass like that!! 

When I first starting working out recipes in my home before I opened the bakery, I would use a squirt bottle to steam my bread. I will tell you what I liked about it first. I liked that I could open the oven and see my beautiful breads working their magic. What I didn’t like about it was everything else, most of all the notion that I kept opening the oven door, which was releasing heat and disturbing the process. The most important thing when baking bread is to trust the process and not disturb it, when you do is when you create problems. Take that advice to say that I prefer you do not use the squirt bottle method unless you are desperate. Deal?

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Before we go any further, I want you to put an image in your mind.  You have a long, well crusted roll and a bread knife in your hand. You slowly start sliding your knife back and forth horizontally as you make a slice from one side of the bread to another, splitting it in half in preparation for your ingredients. You set the top side down and, on the bottom, you drizzle some of your favorite olive oil across the surface. Maybe you took olive oil a few weeks ago and put it into your favorite bottle with fresh thyme for seasoning and aroma. Now you gently take a handful of arugula and spread it across the surface, covering the bread and olive oil. On top, you have your nicely sliced pieces of tomato. Once this is done, you return the top half of the bread and you take a seat in your favorite place to enjoy a simple meal.

As you bite into that first piece of bread, you feel the crust of the bread crumbling between your teeth as you reach the softness of the bread, followed by the tomato and arugula. The flavors take you to a place you have not been and you want that moment to last forever.

Now, I ask you to hold that memory close to your heart as you continue to read, and when it comes time for you to bake your own bread. Then, when you have that moment, that bite, those sensations, and flavors, you will remember that those are from the gift you gave to yourself by making your very own bread.

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Let’s bake some bread.

I have good news for you and bad news for you. Which would you like first? Ok, the bad news! Bread with a lot of flavor takes time. If you read my story about bagels, it is one and the same. With that said, you can still bake this bread in a couple of hours, no problem at all. The good news, the recipe could not be any easier.

I have two Dave Rules for you that are mandatory. One, do not add extra flour while kneading your bread, it is against the law. When you add more flour while kneading you are changing the recipe. Bread does not like to be dense, unless your secret plan is to use the bread as a weight to hold balloons down from floating away. And two, enjoy yourself. Your bread will know if you are not relaxed and it will act accordingly. Yes, it is true, your bread can read your mind, through your hands. Take a moment, breathe a little bit and then you are ready.

This recipe will make two loaves of bread

Ingredients:
1000g bread flour
650g water (room temperature)
25g fresh yeast or 15g of instant dry yeast
20g of salt
20g olive oil (optional)

The process

1. Place the dry ingredients in the bowl and mix together, if you are using dry yeast you can include this now. I know many times people will put the yeast in some water, but it isn’t necessary. If you properly work your bread the yeast will find its way around.
   
2. Add the water and yeast. If you are including olive oil then feel free to add that at this time.
   
3. Mix the dough. I use a bowl scraper to get the party started. As an added bonus, for the first ten people who send me a private message with their name and address, I will send them one of the bowl scrapers I had made for the bakery as a gift. As you are mixing the dough the ingredients start to work together to form a ball. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a perfect ball because we are going to work it on the counter in a moment, but you want to make sure there is no remaining flour.
   
4. Take the dough out and start to work it. Note, I did not say to dust the work surface, why? Correct, we do not want to change the recipe and turn our bread into a brick.  Use your favorite technique of kneading the dough, just make sure you are somehow stretching and folding it. When I studied bread making with Richard Bertinet, a true master of bread making, he used what is called he slap and fold method. You can look it up to see. Or, you can use another traditional method like my friend Jack Sturgess does which is pushing the bread outwardly and pulling it back over. I do not know what this is called. As a side note, Jack is very popular on YouTube and provides bread tips every single week and has been doing this for years. I highly recommend you check out his channel and follow him.
   
   You will know when the dough is done by how it feels and how it reacts to your hands. If you are not applying a lot of pressure when grabbing it and it doesn’t stick to you, this work is now complete.
   
5. At this time, you want to shape the dough a bit to ensure you are creating a top and bottom and building a little bit of strength. Do not spend much time on this, maybe thirty seconds to one minute.
   
6. Take a very little bit of flour and dust the bowl then return you dough to the bowl to rest, top side up. The cover it with a tea towel and let it rest for one hour.

Now that you have had some time to rest, maybe clean up the work area some, and of course, think about that arugula and tomato sandwich, it is time to prepare the rolls.

1. Turn on your oven as high as it goes and place that empty pan in the bottom.
   
2. Lightly dust your work surface and using your bowl scraper, turn the dough out on to the table. You do not want the dough to tear apart at this point, but it can stretch some, especially since we have the gluten working.
   
3. Now we can degas the bread. This is done in one of many ways and the idea is to simply get all the air out of the bread. I generally will lightly punch down on the dough until it flattens out. You do not want to beat the dough up like it owes you money, so if you do not get all of the air out, it is perfectly fine.
   
4. Reshape the dough and cut it into pieces. For this recipe we will cut each piece into 125g, which will yield thirteen dough balls. All of my life I am a superstitious person about so many things, and thirteen always topped the list. I would do anything to avoid the number at all costs, even if it meant taking an extra step on the sidewalk to ensure I walked fourteen, or if climbing a flight of steps with thirteen steps I would skip a step with each step I took, so I only took seven. Then one day a friend who I met in the bakery told me how lovely the number thirteen is and I should embrace it. That was like a light switch moment for me and now I love the number and do not mind including it in everything I do. I do not gravitate to it, but I also do not avoid it.
   
5. Reshape each ball into a small round ball where the top is nice and smooth and feels taught as you poke it with your finger. When all of these are done, we will start shaping the rolls.
   
6. Prepare the pan you are baking the rolls on. I suggest you will need two trays. Also, it might be good to put parchment paper down
   
7. With shaping, there are many different methods. We will not use a traditional method as with baguettes because these rolls are smaller and it just is not necessary, as we will get a nice taught top quickly.  We will use what is called the envelop method.
   
   A. First, flatten out the ball into somewhat of a rectangle shape. Not too thin like a pancake but certainly thinner than a typical slice of bread.
   
   B. Take the two top corners (the top left corner and the top right corner) and fold them in and down a little bit, forming what looks like the back of an envelope.
   
   C. Next take the top of the dough and roll that over to cover those folds you just made with the corners. Continue with the rolling until the dough reaches the bottom of the rectangle.
   
   D. As an extra added method of strength, take the palm of your hand and press that seam at the bottom of the dough to make sure they are together nicely.
   
   E. Putting the top side of the roll up, gently place your hands over the middle of it and start rolling the dough to get it to your desired width. It should, in theory, double the width of what you started with.
   
   F. Optional: Once you have widened the down, take your hands on a forty-five-degree angle and place them at the left and right ends of the roll and press them down and roll some more. This will create nice little tips on the end.
   
8. Place the completed roll on your tray and allow some space between each roll. As they expand a bit over the next twenty to thirty minutes and more in the oven, they will bake together if there is not enough room. Of course, that is ok, but it is not what we want for our experience.  Once you have all thirteen done, cover with a tea towel for twenty minutes.
   
9. After a bit of time has passed, we are going to dust and score our breads. We do this for two reasons: One, it looks really cool, and two, that scoring will allow the bread to breathe while rising which will prevent the bread from exploding uncontrollably.  Take note, we are not making soft top rolls so the temperature is different and we can control those differently to keep from exploding.
   
10. Remove the tea towel. With the classic baker style, holding some flour in your hand and a little opening at the end, whip your hand so that the flour softly flies out and covers the rolls nicely.  Once this is done, take a serrated knife or a razor blade if you have one, and slice the bread across the top from one side to the other.  You want to do this in a rapid manner and not go too deep. In the end, you want to break the skin of the top.
    
11. Now take a cup of water and put it into the oven. Set the oven temperature to 250c / 480F or as high as it goes up to that point. Place your tray of rolls in the middle of the oven, if you have two trays make sure you space them out.  Shut the door quickly and sit back for twelve minutes.
    
12. After twelve or so minutes have passed, turn your oven down to 200 and let the rolls bake for another 10 to fifteen minutes. The amount of time varies because every oven is a bit different and every oven will manage heat a bit differently.
    
13. Before removing the rolls from the oven please note, it is possible there is still a tiny bit of steam left inside, so be careful when pulling the door back to not be in the way of that steam releasing itself outside the oven. I cannot tell you how many times I have been steam burned because I always forget that. And look, we did this last part in thirteen steps, just like the number of beautiful rolls you just created.

Now that your breads are done, take them out of the oven and put on to a cooling rack. The breads need more time to relax after that time in the oven, for the crumb inside to rest and become what it is supposed to be. Do not rush this process.  In about thirty minutes start taking out your arugula and washing it. Then slice your tomatoes and have your olive oil handy.