TOMATO, ONION & CHEESE ROLLS

Method

When you have made a bread, you may want to experiment with flavours and these softer rolls flavoured with tomato, red onion and cheese might be a good start. Nice with cured ham or just with butter with soup.

Although you can just add your filling to a plain roll, sometimes, it is nice to extend the flavour throughout the bread. It is a bit like having a plain rice or a special fried rice.

Top favourites are tomato bread, walnut and seeds. Garlic, Rosemary and olive oil, but it doesn’t have to stop there as you may find in recipe books and online bread recipes.

Basic bread dough can be used to create such rolls. If you don’t want a crusty roll, then don’t use steam in the oven as shown in the basic bread and rolls recipes. Enriched doughs made with milk and other ingredients such as eggs are sometimes also used. Sourdough bread flavoured spinach, sea salt and other herds might be your favourite. The thing is to experiment with food you like.

If you are a lover of herd flavoured bread use fresh herbs, not dried. Use items with lots of flavour so they as not lost during the cooking process.

The Tomato, Onion and Cheese Rolls purely came about as an experiment. I like cheese, cheese/onion and cheese/tomato so I thought this is a good place to start and this worked for me.

You can make these as large or small as you like. Here I make four large rolls but you could easily make six smaller rolls

 

Sift the flour into a large bowl

Add the salt add an easy blend yeast. at this stage keep the two on either side of the bowl. Although salt adds taste it also kills the yeast.

Add to the cold water the sugar and mix until dissolved. The sugar helps feed the yeast and helps to activate it.

Pour the water mixture into the flour and mix first with a wooden spoon before taking over with your hand.

Mix the ingredients well together until it has formed a dough then remove from the bowl and place onto a floured surface.

Add your flavour ingredients, tomato, onion and cheese and

Knead the dough for 5-8 minutes adding a little extra flour if needed. The dough should become silky smooth.

Kneading: Stretch the dough, pull back into a ball turn and repeat. Do this for a couple of minutes until the dough is small and silky. If you start to feel resistance in the knead, stop, it is done. Do not over knead, this as this can make the bread tight and do not under do this part because you will need the dough to become.

The biggest mistake made by people making bread for the first time is to over knead the dough.

Replace the dough into a clean bowl and cover with cling film. Leave in a warm place until the dough has doubled in size. This will take 1 ½ - 2 hours depending on the temperature.

Remove the dough from the bowl and knock back the dough and knead it for a further few minutes. i.e. push the air out. If you use the dough and bake it like it is at this stage you will have air holes inside the finished bread.

Divide the dough into four / six and roll each into piece into balls. If making six leave them like this if making larger rolls now roll these out to form what is known as a finger roll.

Leave for a further 20min to allow for a second rise

Preheat your oven to 230c / 450F / gas mark 8

Bake the rolls for 20-25min. The rolls do not need as long as a full bread loaf because they are much smaller