This week's Bread Baker's Apprentice Challenge is Peter Reinhart's recipe for Kaiser Rolls (which you can get from his book below, starting on page 175-177). Friends joined me in the kitchen and together we had a lot of fun making mini kaiser rolls.
The bread starts out with a pate fermentee, a yeast starter, which is then cut into pieces and introduced with the other dry ingredients - bread flour, yeast, salt, sugar, oil and water. Unlike previous weeks when I used my stand mixer to do the kneading for me, we call took a quarter of the dough and kneaded it by hand. We found bread baking as a group to be pretty enjoyable as we kneaded the together over some good conversation! After the dough had their first rise, we divided the dough and shaped them into small boules for mini kaiser rolls.
To give our own signature look, each of us decorated our rolls with fun cuts like these:
After our creative cuts, we also used dried herbs and seasonings top our rolls for additional flavor...
Once they finished rising, they were ready for the oven! I can't even begin to tell you how wonderful the kitchen smelled as these were baking. Finally after a few minutes, they were ready... and the insides were warm, fluffy and delicious!
