Portuguese Sweet Rolls
Portuguese sweet rolls are soft, slightly sweet, lemon-scented dinner rolls. This recipe is a variation on a recipe by the same name from The King Arthur Flour Baker's Companion (2003 edition), and the easy yeast dough is a suitable yeast bread project for beginners. It doesn't matter whether you use instant, active dry, or fresh (cake) yeast; just use the ordinary-size portion. The recipe won't break over such small changes.
Total Time
3.5 hours
Servings
16
All-purpose flour 3 cups 360 g
Salt 1 teaspoon 6 g
White sugar ⅓ cup 60 g
Potato flour (see notes) ¼ cup 45 g
Yeast (weight given for active dry yeast) 1 packet 1 scant tablespoon 7 g
Butter, room temperature ¾ stick 6 tablespoons 85 g
Milk ½ cup 115 g
Eggs 2 ea. 100 g
Vanilla extract (see notes) 2 teaspoons 10 g
Lemon oil (see notes) ⅛–¼ teaspoon 1–2 g
Warm water (see notes) ¼ cup (2 fl oz) 55 g
Put flour, salt, sugar, potato flour, yeast, and butter into a mixing bowl. If you are using a stand mixer, fit the dough hook and turn the mixer to its lowest setting to begin stirring the ingredients together. If you are mixing by hand, give it a few strokes with a mixing spoon or spatula. The purpose of this step is to mostly distribute the yeast throughout the flour and other ingredients. Don't bother stirring it more than necessary for this step.
Mix the liquid ingredients together. Pour the liquid ingredients into the flour mixture.
Stir everything thoroughly. If you are using a stand mixer, let it run until the dough comes together. This will probably take several minutes. At first, it may look like it will never come together, and then it will suddenly form into a smooth ball, or even into a wet, slack batter. If you are mixing by hand, you can turn the dough out onto a clean, flat surface (can be oiled or floured, as you prefer) and knead the dough by hand for up to 10 minutes, adding flour or water by the spoonful as you feel the need.
10 minutes
Assess the texture of the dough. If the dough seems sticky (e.g., makes a sticky mess on your fingers) and is too slack to form into a smooth, soft ball, then you need to add more flour. Start with a generous spoonful, and stir again until it is incorporated. Repeat the addition as many times as necessary (it is unlikely that you will need to add more than about ½ cup/60 g of flour). If instead there is dry flour in the bottom, then pour a small spoonful of warm water directly on that dry part, and mix again until the dry flour and the water have been thoroughly incorporated. If you overcorrected, then add a spoonful of flour until you get a workable texture.
Unless it's a hot day, turn on the empty, cold oven for one minute. Then turn the oven off. The purpose of this short "preheating" is to make a comfortably warm place for the dough to rise.
Cover the dough to keep the surface from drying out. You can do this by coating the surface of the dough with oil, or by putting a lid or a big plate over the top of the mixing bowl.
Put the bowl of dough in the (now slightly warm) oven or another warm place. Double check that the oven has been turned off.
Let the dough rise for about 1 hour, until clearly puffy and almost twice the original volume. If you used cold water, it will take longer.
1 hour
If you're using parchment paper, place a piece of parchment on your baking sheet. Otherwise, you can lightly grease the pan to keep the buns from sticking.
Sprinkle a big spoonful of flour on your work surface, and spread this out a bit.
Remove the bowl of dough from the oven. Scrape the puffy dough onto your floured work surface.
Roll the dough in the flour to lightly coat all sides with the flour. If needed, put more flour on your work surface to keep it from sticking. Roll the dough into a rough log shape. Use a sharp knife or a bench scraper to cut the dough into about 16 pieces of similar size.
Pick up one piece. Dust the wet edges in the remaining flour on your work surface, so it won't stick to your fingers. Choose one of the smoother sides of that piece to be the "top" of your roll. Grab the edges around your chosen "top" surface, and stretch or pinch them back to the "bottom". This has the effect of stretching the smooth side and hiding any lumpy bits on the bottom. Pinch the lumpy bits together on the bottom. Flatten the bun between your hands, and put it pinched-side-down on your baking sheet.
Repeat this for the other 15 pieces of dough, until all of the pieces are shaped. When you place the rolls on the baking sheet, leave about an inch or two in between them, so they have room to grow in the oven.
Place the baking sheet with the shaped buns back in the barely warm oven. Leave it there for about 45 minutes or an hour to proof. If your oven has cooled off while you were shaping the buns, you can warm it up again for 30 seconds or so, but be sure to turn it off before you put the pan of raw dough in the oven.
45 minutes
When the buns look nicely puffy, take the baking sheet of raw dough out of the oven.
Preheat the empty oven to 325 °F (165 °C, gas mark 3, moderately slow/warm).
When it is hot, put the proofed buns in the oven and bake for about 20 minutes. Cover them lightly with a piece of aluminum foil to prevent overbrowning, and then bake another 10 minutes (total of 30 minutes in the oven). If you are using a thermometer to check the internal temperature, aim for 190 °F (88 °C).
20 minutes
Serve hot, warm, or at room temperature with butter and jam. Alternatively, slice them in half and use them for sandwiches.
- •Potato flour is a fine powder made by drying and grinding white potatoes. It is useful for keeping bread doughs soft and baked goods moist longer. If you don't have any, then you can substitute unflavored instant mashed potato flakes (same weight, which is a much bigger volume), cornstarch (same volume), or plain all-purpose flour (same volume).
- •Vanilla extract is called for, but you can use whatever style of vanilla flavoring you have on hand. Two teaspoons of vanilla extract is a moderately large amount of vanilla (twice what you would put in a typical batch of cookies), so you may need to use a larger than usual amount of vanilla sugar, vanilla paste, etc.
- •Lemon oil is not the same as lemon extract. Instead, it is a pure oil pressed out of the outer skin of a lemon. If you don't have it on hand, use 1 heaping teaspoon finely shredded lemon zest (not candied lemon peel), 1 teaspoon lemon extract, or 1 ounce (30 g) lemon juice (and then reduce the warm water by the same amount). If you have very strong lemon oil, you may prefer to measure it with an eye dropper instead of a measuring spoon; you'll need about 10–20 drops of oil.
- •For the warm water, ordinary hot water straight from the tap is fine. The water should be warm but definitely not boiling, so you don't accidentally cook the yeast in the mixing bowl. If you haven't got hot water, then cold water will work, but your raising time will be a little longer.
- •This recipe cannot be made gluten-free.
- •Shaping the rolls takes practice. Once you get used to it, it may take as little as 10 minutes to shape the entire batch, but for your first time, plan for it to take longer. If the process for shaping the rolls is too confusing or awkward for you (or for a young helper), you can just roll them into balls. The results won't look quite as smoothly professional, but they will taste every bit as good.
- •These rolls can be baked in a solar oven. In a fully preheated, powerful box cooker, they'll take about as long to bake as they do in a conventional oven. In a more ordinary solar cooker, they will take longer. Remember that, in a solar oven, bread does not brown as much.
- •Store cooked rolls at room temperature. They keep well for a couple of days. You can also freeze them for several months.