It was not easy, but we finally created the perfect dinner roll! There are no commercial bread products available that meet our dietary requirements (corn and dairy free), so we decided to create our own dinner rolls for the Thanksgiving table. Simple enough, we will take a basic recipe and plug in our substitutions and viola! we will have scrumptious dinner rolls that everyone will fawn over. NOT!
I found a recipe for King's Hawaiian Sweet Bread online, so we decided to start there. They were horrible, but if we tweak this and that... Attempt two, was slightly less horrible. Finally, I dug out my old fashioned cookbook. This is the Pillsbury book and I absolutely love it. I always start online for something and realize that my Pillsbury book has what I just spent hours looking for and it was sitting on the shelf, just flip to the page and here we go. Again, my Pillsbury proved true. There is a recipe for Hawaiian Sweet Bread. Similar, but very different from the first recipe. Well, Sarah and I race to the kitchen to start. The rolls worked better, but were still not right. Now they are too plain, need a little kick, plus the dough is way too sticky. Now it is time to get creative. We start pretending that we understand chemistry enough to figure out why did batch 4 not rise? Did we have too much salt and kill the yeast? Maybe the kitchen was too cold. On and on we go until FINALLY! We had a viola! We now have the perfect recipe for rolls. A little sweet, a little wheat, soft yet firm, and very yummy! Quick, remember what we did? Oh, no, how do we repeat this success? We did get it written down and here it is... Our idea of a perfect dairy and corn free dinner roll!
Hawaiian Sweet Rolls
1/3 cup honey
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 cup almond milk
2 T orange juice (at room temperature)
1/4 cup coconut butter
1/2 cup pineapple juice (room temperature)
2 eggs, beaten
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ginger
1/3 cup mashed potatoes (or potato flakes)
2 cup bread flour
2 cup whole wheat flour
2 1/4 tsp dry active yeast
I used the bread machine on dough setting and then formed rolls.
Be sure to use parchment paper and to oil your hands, this dough is very sticky.
Preheat oven to 200 while shaping rolls. Turn off oven and place rolls in oven to rise, about 30 minutes, until doubled.
Remove from oven and preheat to 350, then return to oven for approximately 15 minutes.
