Joan's Roll Recipe

Joan's Roll Recipe

This recipe is copied in my sister's handwriting - which I always admired.  Joan was her sister-in-law (they both married Muckley men).
I greased a big, plastic bowl.
I have a bread machine and it has recipes for rolls so if I can't make this recipe in the bread machine than it won't be worth the effort for me.  
When I can, I pour and level over some sort of vessel to recapture the overage.
Because I make a lot of bread, I buy yeast by the jar not the packet.  Lucky for me the jar explains that 2 1/4 tsp yeast is the equivalent of 1 pkg.
I measured the milk into a microwaveable measuring cup with extra room.
I don't have a good 1/4 cup measure for something like crisco so I looked at this chart and added 4 TBSP instead.  I keep this on the side of my refrigerator.
 I added shortening, sugar and salt into the Pyrex and heated in the microwave on "beverage".  
Before adding the liquid I swirled the flour and yeast in my bread pan.
After microwaving I stirred a bit to finish melting the crisco.
I used the dough setting on the bread machine and set the timer for 3 minutes.
Oops, after 3 minutes the whole egg was still running around.  Perhaps I should have lightly beaten it first.

I let it run for a bit more until I didn't see the whole egg yolk anymore.

I continued to use the bread machine (it can operate with the lid up) to add the remaining flour in small batches.
It took a little longer than I expected to get into ball form.
The dough kept sticking to one corner of the pan so I had to chase it around a bit with a spatula.
When I dumped the dough into the greased bowl, the paddle was stuck in the dough so I had to dig it out.
The dough was very sticky so I called my husband to dump some more flour since dough was all over my fingers.
I've seen recipes that call for coating the Saran Wrap with vegetable oil so the risen dough doesn't stick.  This one did not.  I wasn't sure how much the dough would rise but I took my chances and did not coat the wrap.
After about 5 hours in the fridge.  It was 3:30 when I started making the balls.
I roughly divided the dough into quarters and aimed to get 6 rolls out of each quarter.
I remember my sister used to use a roll recipe that called for putting three small balls into each tin.  So I did have the rolls as 3 small balls and the other half as 1 large ball.  I only got 20 rolls total.
It was spring and my house wasn't feeling too warm.  If it was laundry day I'd put these in the laundry room to rise.  Instead I used the proof setting on my oven.  They were in for about 1 hr. 10 mins.

At 5 o'clock I took them out of the oven and was pleased with how they had risen.  After the proof cycle they were warm but I did not need to use pot holders to take out the pans.  I then began pre-heating the oven.


After 10 mins. the rolls were golden.  They looked a little dry so I dabbed some butter on top of the whole-ball rolls and served them for dinner.  The 3-ball rolls I put in a ziploc freezer bag and will use them another time since 3 of us did not need to eat 20 rolls at one dinner.

The rolls were a great texture but we found them a little blah.  Like a bit of flavor was missing.  I tried putting butter on them and then they tasted like butter.  I also tried butter and apple jelly.  It seemed like just a vehicle to get the jelly to my mouth.

For homemade rolls - they are impressive: consistent, nice roll shape and feel, not too much effort.  But I might play with adding a spice or something.  When I started making my own bread we thought it was a bit bland too so I added a touch of cumin (I don't remember why I settled on that spice).  Gradually I transitioned away from the cumin and don't add anything to my bread that is not in the recipe and it doesn't bother us now so maybe we'd get used to these rolls too.

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