No Knead Dinner Rolls

Hello, everyone!  Happy Tuesday!  As I have stated many, many times before, I love bread.  I don't just love bread.  I adore it.  Every time I walk by the bakery at the store, I have to stop and breathe in the fresh baked bread smell.
If they sold a candle with the fresh baked bread smell, I'd buy those in bulk.  I'm sure they do, but I'm afraid to look, I don't think we could afford to have a spare room full of fresh baked bread candles.

But it would smell amazing.

So, what do you do if you can't buy a candle for the smell?  Bake bread!  And don't worry, this recipe calls for no kneading, and I would venture to say, even no effort.

I put this dough together one night at 10 PM, and didn't touch it until 3PM the next day.  And that was just to form them into dough balls, let them rise again, and popped them into the preheated oven.

Yep, that's it.

No hot water to worry about, "Is it too hot?  How hot is too hot?  Let me check it on my arm...ouch! Yeah, that's too hot.  I'm going to let it cool for a minute.  Is it too cool now?  I DON'T KNOW!!!"

Believe me, I've been through it all, and I have found some great recipes, that are easy (you can find those here: challah bread, honey loaf bread, homemade pita bread, easy sourdough bread, fresh bread...you get the idea.)

I got the recipe from this wonderful YouTube video (found here), and this walks you through this recipe, step-by-step.

Here's your grocery list for this one:

3 C bread flour

1/4 tsp yeast

12 oz tap water, cool*

1 1/2 tsp table salt

1 egg yolk

1-2 Tbs water

That's it!  *I used tap water, on the coldest setting; not to try anything, that's just how it was already set, and I was ready to go to bed.  I just got 12 oz of water out and put it in.  So, to get started, put the 3 cups of bread flour into a large bowl, since this will double, and maybe even triple in size as it rises.  Add in the salt, and the yeast, and give it a quick whisk.

All beautiful, add in the water, and stir it with the handle of a spoon (I used just a regular plastic serving spoon, not that it matters), until the dough starts to stick to the bowl.  Cover with plastic, and set aside for at least 8 hours, but, as I stated earlier, I set mine aside for 15 hours, just on a counter top.  Almost twice as long, and it still worked just fine.  This dough is very forgiving.

Okay, some hours later, your dough will look like this, and the top of the plastic will look foggy, from all of the gasses that the yeast has released.

This smells amazing.  Dump it all out onto a very well floured work surface, since this dough is very sticky.  Don't forget to cover the top with flour, too.

Gather the dough up into a ball-ish shape, and cut it into 8 even pieces.  I do this by cutting the dough in half, then the two pieces in half (giving me four pieces), and cutting those in half again, giving me eight pieces.  I wasn't too careful when I was cutting these; we had been out of the house all day, and I was just flat out tired, and I was trying to get these done quickly (seriously, how lazy did I have to be, because this is next to no effort involved here).

Ideally, put these dough balls onto some parchment paper, but I didn't have any, and put my dough balls onto some aluminum foil.  I also probably should have sprayed the aluminum foil with some nonstick spray, although I was able to get the rolls off of the foil with no problem.  So, take your eight pieces, form them into balls, and put them on your parchment paper (let's use our imaginations, and pretend that this foil is parchment paper).  Cover these dough balls with a clean kitchen towel, and set aside for 1 1/2 hours - 2 hours. 

Alrighty, about 30 minutes before you have your time up, preheat your oven to 450; the oven has to be preheated for 30 minutes.  While you're waiting, beat the egg yolk with 1-2 Tbs of water, for an egg wash.  Gently brush these dough balls with the egg wash.

Score these dough balls; instead of a knife, I used scissors to just cut into them.  You can sprinkle the tops of these with salt (it's easier to do so before you score them); I opted to not use any extra salt on these, because I figured I might toast some of these up the next morning for breakfast.

I scooted a pan under these, and baked them for 18 minutes.  This gave me a perfectly chewy crust, with the inside still being soft and just perfect.  These will definitely be in a near weekly rotation in our house!