Mia Bakes: Cinnamon Rolls

It's been a while since I've gotten the breadmaker and I've progressed from baking soft and fluffy refined white bread to the healthier, dense and tough 100% wholegrain bread. And judging that it's just 1 day away from my weekly cheatday (whereby I eat whatever I want, refined carbohydrates, sugar, whatever!), I decided to try out a non-breadmaker bread recipe that I've been wanting to try out. 

CINNAMON ROLLS! 

I've googled up a few recipes that looks more or less similar to each other and decided to just go ahead with nigella.com and incorporate yudane method into it to get softer, fluffier rolls with a little wholegrain.

So let's get over the ingredients so we can get started!

For the yudane dough:

40g (minus 1/2 tsp) all purpose flour

1/2 vital wheat gluten

40ml boiling water

For the bread dough:

20g wholemeal flour (couldn't resist adding it!)

1 tbsp (15g) vital wheat gluten

125g all purpose flour

35g soften unsalted butter

1/8 tsp salt

1 tsp instant yeast

20g granulated sugar

1 tsp ground cinnamon

95ml milk (lukewarm)

For the filling:

35g soften unsalted butter

35g muscovado sugar

(you can use brown sugar or white sugar)

2 tsp ground cinnamon 

Raisins (optional)

First up, prepare the yudane dough by mixing the flour and VWG with boiling water in a bowl and stirring until it comes together to form a sticky dough. Wrap it in cling wrap (to prevent drying out) and set aside (or pop it into the fridge) to cool down. 

Remember, do not add the scalding hot yudane dough directly into your bread dough mixture!

So while the yudane dough is cooling down, add your yeast to lukewarm milk and set aside for about 10 minutes or until it starts to froth up. 

I suggest that you add about 60 to 80ml of the milk at this stage first as the total amount of liquid may vary from flour to flour. It's always better to start off with a drier dough and add more liquid, as opposed to having to add a lot more flour and ending up with a much larger loaf than expected. 

Then, add in all the dry ingredients and cooled yudane dough and start mixing/kneading (I used my BM for this, but you can always use a mixer with dough hook or do it by hand!) until it starts to come together into a dough ball. At this stage, knead in the soften butter until well combined. You may add in more milk or flour judging from the dough's texture at this point. Continue kneading until you achieve windowpane stage. Check for the windowpane stage by taking a small piece of the dough and stretching it out with your fingers. You should be able to stretch it for quite a bit until the dough gets really, really thin and almost translucent before it finally breaks apart. 

On my Mayer BM12, I first ran mix dough function, followed by ferment dough function. 

Otherwise, form your bread dough into a smooth ball and place it in a greased bowl, cover with cling wrap and leave it in a warm place to proof for 1 hour, or until it has doubled in size. If your oven does not have a proofing function, then perhaps you can set your dough bowl in the oven (switched off!) and place a bowl of hot water underneath. That should work too. :)

While the dough is going through 1st proofing, prepare the filling by simply mixing the soften butter, sugar and cinnamon together into a paste. 

When the dough is done proofing, turn it out onto a clean surface (I have a non-stick silicon mat for this) and give it a few quick kneads to knock out all the air bubbles first, before rolling it out into a 9 by 5 inch (roughly, about there.... I just eyeballed it) rectangle. Spread the filling all over, leaving about half an inch around the perimeter. If you fancy some raisins, sprinkle a handful evenly over the surface before rolling the dough up on the long edge. Give the seam a few soft nips to make sure that it doesn't fall apart when you slice it. 

And yup, slice away! Cut the log into 9 1-inch pieces and set them cut side up on a lightly greased 9 by 9 inch baking pan. 

Then, cover slightly with a cling wrap and leave it in a warm place for 2nd proofing for about 15 to 20 minutes (or until the rolls "grow" into each other and completely fills up the pan). 

Brush the top of the rolls with egg wash (very important if you want pretty looking rolls) and set the rolls to bake in a pre-heated oven at 225 degree Celsius for about 12 to 15 minutes (I baked mine for 15 minutes but as we all know baking time varies from oven to oven). 

I skipped the egg wash out of laziness and ended up with dull looking cinnamon rolls. T.T 

If you would prefer not to add in wholemeal flour, just replace the whole recipe with just all purpose flour (you can skip the VWG as well, as adding VWG is just my habit after baking wholegrain bread for so long, it just feels incomplete without adding them in). 

Due to the yudane dough, these rolls ended up so soft and fluffy (a bread texture I've almost forgotten after switching to wholegrain) and it made my entire kitchen smelled so good while baking in the oven. 

ALL THOSE SWEET, CINNAMON, BUTTERY SMELLS....

And 1 roll is only about 150 kcals, pretty decent for a #cheatdayeat yes?

Till then,

Mia Foo

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Mia Bakes: Red Tea Chia Seed Yudane Bread (Mayer BM12 Recipe)

This is my 2nd time trying the Yudane (Utane) method and I've previously tried the famous Tang Zhong (TZ) method for a fruit loaf and I would say it yields pretty similar results, just that the yudane method does not require 'cooking' over the stove and hence I stuck to it. Both methods help to gelatinise the starch in the flour, giving it a higher moisture content which yields a softer and more elastic bread loaf. 

While the TZ method calls for a 5 - 10% of the total flour content in the recipe with 5 parts of water and then cooking the mixture over small flame to hit 65 degree Celsius, the yudane method I've used calls for about 20% of the total flour content with equal ratio of boiling water. 

Before I elaborate on how to execute the yudane method, let's first get started on the original bread recipe given in the Mayer recipe book.

250g bread flour

180ml boiling water 

(to brew a flavoured tea of your choice)

20g salted butter

3g sea salt

30g sugar

3g active dry yeast

5 tablespoons chia seeds

To "yudanish" the bread recipe, simply use about 20% of the flour content to make the yudane dough with equal parts of boiling water. 

So for an original recipe with 250g of flour, my yudane dough will make up of 50g of bread flour with 50ml of boiling water. Just add the boiling water to the flour and stir until it comes together to form a wet, sticky dough and cool it down before proceeding with the rest of the baking procedure. 

So with the yudane dough done, the flour and water content of my remaining recipe will be reduced to 200g bread flour to 130ml of brewed tea. However, being not very trusting of the Mayer's recipe book, I've decided to give the recipe and its listed procedure a little tweak to get this particular recipe I've done for this Red Tea Chia Seed Loaf.

Yudane Dough: 50g Bread Flour + 50g Water (chilled in fridge)

180g bread flour

20g top flour

130ml red tea (chilled in fridge)

20g unsalted butter

2.5g table salt 

30g sugar

3g instant yeast

5 tablespoons chia seeds (grounded)

Add in cold tea, yudane dough, sugar, salt, and flour mixture into the bread pan, followed by instant yeast. Fit the bread pan into the bread machine and start the Mix Dough function, which will mix and knead the dough for 25 minutes straight. After 25 minutes, start the Soft Bread function (500g) and add in the grounded chia seeds and butter to mix. 

At the pattern sounding beep (1:30), remove the kneading paddle and let the BM finish its job.

TADAA~ 

Fragrant and soft Red Tea Chia Seed Bread! There's hardly any tea flavour in the bread but somehow there's a nice fragrance from the bread loaf that's a lot more distinct as compared to my past bakes. It might be because the semi-grounded chia seeds got roasted and gave our the fragrance, or it might really be the red tea that contributed to the nice smell. So try it and let me know how it went for you!

Till then,

Mia Foo

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