How
to Make Kaiser Rolls
Want
to impress your family and friends at the next gathering? Serve sandwiches
on Kaiser Rolls. They’ll look so professional--like they came
from the bakery. You don’t have to tell them how easy they were.
If you can make dinner rolls, you can make Kaiser Rolls.
You can make Kaiser
Rolls out of any lean bread dough but if you would like to make your
rolls from a mix, we suggest using our Sunday
Dinner Rolls. Simply leave the butter out and add another half-tablespoon
of water.
A
Kaiser Roll is merely a lean roll, specially shaped, and baked in a
steamy oven to make it crusty. Choose a recipe or mix for a lean bread
dough—or leave the butter or oil out of the recipe. Make per the
directions for rolls including letting the dough rise the first time.
Here’s how
to shape the rolls:
Step
1:
Cut a piece of dough off about twice what you would use for a dinner
roll. (We scale the dough at 3.5 ounces for our sandwich rolls.) Roll
the dough out into a rope about eight inches long.
Step 2:
Form a simple over-hand knot in the center of the dough. Leave the knot
loose; do not try to draw it tight. You will have two protruding ends
a couple inches long.
Step 3:
Take one of the ends and continue it around the rope and push it down
through the center hole. It should look like the picture to the right.
Step 4:
Take the other end of the dough, go around the rope, and push the end
up through the center hole. The finished roll should look like the one
to the right. 
It’s more
complicated to try to describe the forming process than it is to form
the rolls. After the first couple, you’ll breeze right through
without even thinking.
Now let the formed
rolls rise covered on a baking sheet. When they are ready to bake, brush
them with a whisked egg and one tablespoon water, then sprinkle them
with sesame or poppy seeds. You can bake them as you would dinner rolls
but if you would like crusty roll like true Kaiser Rolls, follow the
direction for baking breads in a steamy oven.
To form the thick,
chewy crust that is typical of artisan breads, follow these instructions:
Place a large, shallow, metal pan in the oven on the lowest shelf. You
will pour hot water in this pan to create steam in the oven. High heat
is hard on pans so don’t use one of your better pans. An old sheet
pan is ideal. Fill a spray bottle with water. You will use this to spray
water into the oven to create more steam.
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Preheat the oven
to 450 degrees. When the oven is hot and the bread is fully risen and
is soft and puffy--being very careful not to burn yourself with the
rising steam and with a mitted hand--pour about two cups of very hot
water in the pan in the oven. Quickly close the oven door to capture
the steam. With spray bottle in hand, open the door and quickly spray
the oven walls and close the door.
Immediately put
the bread in the steamy oven. After a few moments, open the door and
spray the walls again to recharge the steam. Do this twice more during
the first ten minutes of baking. This steamy environment will create
the chewy crust prized in artisan breads.
You can use this
baking procedure for crusty hearth breads also. For rolls, bake for
ten minutes at 450 degrees then lower the temperature to 350 degrees
until done. How long you will bake them will depend on how quickly your
oven loses heat but it will probably be about ten additional minutes
(a total of 20 minutes). As for all hearth breads, the internal temperature
of your crusty rolls should be about 210 degrees. (If crusty rolls are
not well baked, the internal moisture will migrate to the crust and
make it soft.)
You can make Kaiser
Rolls out of any lean bread dough but if you would like to make your
rolls from a mix, we suggest using our Sunday Dinner Rolls. Simply leave
the butter out and add another half-tablespoon of water. To make it
even easier, try our Sunday
Dinner Rolls.
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