Know Yo' Dough - Baking Tools, Tips, and Techniques

1. Know Yo' Dough Intro: What's up, guys? I'm Becky Sue. Thank you for enrolling in my skill share class. Getting to know your dough today. We're gonna dive deep into dough, and I'm gonna show you the importance of having an awesome quality dough in order to get a beautiful baked good. So we will begin by discussing the importance of quality ingredients and how those played into delicious baked goods. Then we will go over my top 10 essential baking tools, which I have laid out here. We're gonna incorporate these tools, my favorite tips and techniques into baking up three different types of dough. We're gonna start with an awesome shortbread cookie. It's simple, it's delicious. And we're gonna move on to some great quick breads scones. And finally, we're gonna end with some fluffy, delicious dinner rolls You can share with your family and friends and be the most popular person in any potluck. So let's do this. Let's get to know your does 2. Background on Becky Sue: before we begin, I'd like to share a little bit about myself. I am, for the most part, self taught Baker. I have a website baking the goods dot com, where I post recipes some of my favorites with step by step instructions walking you through some of my top recipes. I did a little bit of time up north at an artisan bread bakery this past year. I learned a lot about artisanal breads and what goes into making beautiful baguettes. But for the most part, I've learned everything on my own. I was not one of those kids that shadowed their grandmother in the kitchen. I probably would have failed my home at class if I hadn't cheated. Don't tell Mrs Manion, but I understand what it is to be like in your shoes. I know where you're coming from, and I want to help you get over that hump and start making the best big goods. So let's get speaking 3. The Importance of Quality Ingredients: Let's briefly touch on the importance of quality ingredients. It's essentially this. You're going to get out what you put in, right? So if you're using crappy chocolate that you bought it a cheap store, you're gonna taste that. Your final product, for example. We're making shortbread cookies today, which are rich, buttery cookie. So let's use a rich, buttery butter like this European style butter. It has a higher fat content or Richard deeper flavor that's really gonna shine. Um, using flour. I like to use something I know one trust, and that way I'm not surprised by anything when I'm baking up my delicious baked goods and chocolate, I can't harp on this enough. I can't stand bad chocolate. So you something that's got a great flavor, a deep richness and spend a little more money. Essentially, let's let's do this. Let's by what we can afford right, the best quality ingredients you can afford. And you're gonna taste that. It's gonna really shine through in your baked goods 4. Top 10 Baking Tools: here we go with my top 10 essential baking tools. We're not talking measuring cups and mixing bowls. You guys know about that stuff already. We're going to get a little bit more involved, a little bit more professional. So we're going to start here with a kitchen aid mixer, either Expensive. I know that, but they're an investment piece. I've had mine at least eight years and they're totally worth it There, The workhorse of your kitchen. I promise you won't regret it. So today we're going to use a dough hook and a paddle attachment with our mixer moving on, we have a kitchen scale. A kitchen scale is really great for getting uniform sizes and measuring. And then we have a thermometer. Sometimes things are temperamental and you're going to need this. Next up is a bench knife. A bench knife really does So many jobs cuts it scrapes. It does everything. It's awesome. Ah, sharp kitchen knife. You're going to use this a lot. I know that sounds more like something a chef needs, but a pastry chef will use this often. I promise. Ah, pastry blender, the pastry blender we use all the time in things like pie does and scones, which you'll see today the's Silpat mats. They will line your baking sheets and they help prevent over browning and sticking their awesome too Spatulas these air. Great. You're gonna use them constantly. I like these silicone specialist I like, especially these ones with kind of a spoon for really scraping doughs and batters, then parchment paper. You can use this in place of this silicone mats, but they also come in handy for shaping. Does I'm gonna show you some tricks today and finally we have pastry brush. This we use all the time for egg washes and using melted butter over roles. So there you have it. My top 10 essential tools. Let's do this. Let's get to baking. 5. Lemon Poppy Seed Shortbread Cookies Part 1: Our first recipe today is a lemon poppy seed. Shortbread cookie Shortbread is a very simple dough. It's essentially just three ingredients. It's usually just one part sugar to two parts. Butter 24 parts flour so two cups flour to one cup butter and 1/2 cup of sugar. That's math. I'm not great at that. But that's right. And we are also going to incorporate these ingredients here, since we want to spice it up, give it a little bit more flavor. We're gonna make a lemon poppy seed, so we're gonna use the zest and juice of one lemon, a little bit of almond extract about a teaspoon and then two tablespoons of poppy seeds. Here the salt. Here, we've got a teaspoon of that just will give it a little bit fuller flavor, and it will really make these other flavors shine. So let's begin by measuring out our flower. When you measure flower, you don't want to dig right in like this because you're really gonna over pack your measuring cup and you're not gonna have a proper measurement. So dump that l you want to use a scoop or another measuring cup, too? Pour the flower right into your measuring cups, something like this, until it starts to overflow. And then you want to use something flat, or like the back of maybe a butter knife or something like this, and just level it off here. So now you have a nice, even level surface. There's one cup we're doing too. So let's scoop another cup just right into that cup. Level it off and there we are, two cups of flour. Now we're gonna incorporate the rest of our dry ingredients. So we're gonna dump that teaspoon of salt right in here and also those two tablespoons of poppy seeds. Now you're gonna just take a whisk and whisk these ingredients together until they're fully blended. You don't want any big chunks of poppy seeds or salt because that would make for an interesting biting a cookie so mixed those Well, perfect. Now that those air mixed up we can blend together are sugar and butter. We're gonna take these over to our stand mixer. We're going to cream together. Are butter and sugar using our stand mixer. So opened this guy up. We've got the paddle attachment attached, and then you're gonna just drop your butter right into the bowl. This butter is at room temperature. That's important to remember, because it will incorporate the sugar better into the butter. If it's at room temperature, then we're gonna add our sugar. No. Lock this guy down and we're gonna crank this up to a medium speed. We're gonna let it whip for about a total of five minutes. But periodically we're going to check the creamed mixture to make sure that it's creaming together and scrape down the sides. That's looking pretty good. We're not quite there yet, so let's take are silicone spatula. Scrape down the sides of the bowl extreme. Get all of that butter and sugar so you don't have any big clumps of either one. Okay, lock this backend. We're gonna crank it back up to about a six. Maybe another two minutes at that speed. Okay, I have turned this up to about an eight. A medium high speed just to really whip that butter and sugar together. Um, so we've been going about five minutes. We've got a really light, fluffy, airy product. Now you can see that they've totally creamed together. The color is actually lighter in color and the texture is very light. That's what you want. That's what we're after. So now we're just going to incorporate our lemon zest are lemon juice and are almond extract. So just grab these guys. Just gonna pour each of them in. We've got our almond extract, the zest of one lemon and the juice of one lemon. Great. Lock this down again. We're gonna just turn this up to a medium speed for about a minute to get all of those ingredients incorporated. We are all creamed up here on ready to incorporate our dry ingredients. So just scrape this stuff off and I'm just gonna grab our dry ingredients real quick, okay? Or don't scrape it off. So now we're just going to lock this down and turn this on of slow stir and gently, slowly at the dry ingredients to the creamed mixture real slow so you don't get that big puffy cloud of flour, and you just want to mix until it's just incorporated here. You don't want to over mix and have like a big ball of dough. It should be still a little bit crumbly and a little bit rough. better toe under mix than overmix. It seems just about right. What's there we are. It's sticking together, but it's not too wet. Perfect. Scraped that still quick scrape and a quick little blend again, just for good measure. Now we're ready to shape screams. 6. Lemon Poppy Seed Shortbread Cookies Part 2: Now we're going to just make sure we get all of that dough off of our paddle using our spatula, and then we're really gonna scrape the dough off of the sides of the bowl so it's ready to be turned out. So just take some flour and lightly flour your work surface here. It's nice. And then you're just gonna turn the dough out onto your surface. It's a little sticky. Hey, get this offer here. And then again, just use this guy to really scrape all of this out. They want to miss out on a cookie because you didn't scrape some dough. Great. Now is gonna gather this dough gently with her hands until you have kind of a nice shape here, maybe turn it a time or two coated in flour until you have a nice, round, pretty even disc shaped here. Perfect. Then you're gonna take your bench knife and use it to cut this dough directly in half. So you have dose knows here, and we're gonna use these to shape to shortbread logs we've got are two separate does not set one aside, and we're gonna take our 1st 1 and just sort of start shaping it into Maybe, like, a general log shape. Just basic little log. We'll do that with both of them. Okay, No problem setting that aside and then we're gonna take our handy bench knife again and just kind of scrape up our mess. Look at that. Amazing. My favorite tool. Beautiful. Then let's grab our parchment paper, Lay it down. We're gonna get tricky here, so taking our dough log are rough. Little love, You plop him right there and you're just gonna kind of roll them into around a shape just to start it, get it going. So that's nice. That's a pretty decent shape we've got going push it towards an end here, and then you're just gonna tuck in the ends up and you're gonna begin to roll. The cookies were gonna want him about an inch around, so that seems about right. You don't want to rule it too thin, so just roll it in the paper. Perfect. Keep it tight. Now we're gonna create little pigtails by twisting the ends. So starting on one and we're gonna twist away from ourselves. It's nice and tight, the other, and you're gonna twist towards yourself, and it's going to create this kind of locking mechanism, right? So it's gonna compact the dough together and really push it together. So it's tight and smooth. Now you can take this little log and just smooth it out, Roll it out. Starting in the middle, working your way outwards. Beautiful. And I like to take my piggies again. Great. Now I'm gonna show you a fancy little trick I learned on the internet. We take a used empty paper towel roll. It's about an inch around, and you're just gonna slip your dough right into that. Look at that fit. Well, real tight. Maybe a little too tight. Pull. Yep. There we go. Perfect. So it's packed in there. Real type. We're gonna chill the dough inside this paper, tell role, and it's gonna hold that round perfect shape. So you don't get like a little dome cookie with a flat bottom and around top Gonna be round all the way around. It's perfect. So we're gonna pop these into the fridge. Probably at least an hour. You can freeze them, save them for later, if you like, as well. We've just pulled our dough from the fridge. And, um, we're gonna quickly make an egg wash before we cut those dough logs into a shape. So you're just gonna take a single egg, hit it on the counter here, crack it into a little bowl and whisk that little egg together until it's nice and smooth. Some people add salt. Some people add water or cream to have, like, a different finish. I like a shiny finish, so I just use an eggs simplest way. Okay, we're good. They're gonna set that aside. Now we're gonna grab one of our little doe logs. That's been chilling. We're gonna untwist are piggies on. Unroll that. Go beautiful. You'll see I've laid down cutting board since we're going to slice into this. I don't want to ruin my beautiful countertops in my lovely rental home. So here we go. Now we're taking that awesome little pastry brush that I recommended. Just gonna lightly dip it in the wash here, and then you're gonna gently brush that egg wash all up, then down at the hug, turning it over so you get completely covered on all sides. Just a light coating. You don't want it to be too heavy. you don't want it to. Kind of like melt that dough. Just a really nice, lightly brushed I don't. Perfect. So that is washed Now we're gonna take this sparkling sugar. It's called. Um it's also referred to a standing sugar. You can use regular sugar or you can use any kind of sugar. Really? Um, and then you're just like this one, cause it's really sparkly. It looks really pretty. You're just gonna Sprinkle that right on to the log, and it's gonna adhere to that egg wash so that egg wash is gonna basically seal this sugar right onto your cookies. So then you're gonna just turn it kind of get all sides all the way to the edge. Sprink Oh, it's beautiful. So sweet in the last side here. Really simple. You could also do this with, like, thinly sliced almonds for I don't know, any kind of Not really. It's chopped up there we are just kind of roll it in that sugar and make sure it's evenly coated. That looks great. Now, this is where your sharp knife is gonna come in handy. You're gonna start at the end and you're gonna cut the log into little cookies about maybe 1/2 a quarter to 1/2 inch thick, depending on how you like them. I like mine pretty thick because I like a good bite to My cookie was cutting right along that log. See how great it is to have a sharp knife. It's like a, uh, hot knife through butter. Essentially what? It's what's happening. So just slice that all the way down. Happy little cookies look so cute. Beautiful. So here we are. We've got these great little round cookies here, and they are ready to bake. 7. Lemon Poppy Seed Shortbread Cookies Part 3: Okay, these are all cut up. So I'm just gonna slide this over, grab our baking sheet lined with one of those fancy little Silpat mats, and we're gonna place our cookies right on top of the mat. Probably about 12. A three toe, three by four grid per sheet, evenly spaced. And then these are going to go in the oven for about, uh, 16 to 18 minutes at 3 25 They're going to start to just turn a golden brown around the edge and have a little bit of a give. So that's how you'll know they're ready. Going in. Sounds like our shortbread is ready, so we're gonna reach in here. Grab these Little shorty's. They look great. Smells really nice. All right, look in good. So we can tell if these air done by just taking your finger and touching here. It should give just a little bit. It shouldn't be too hard and firm. Then you can also tell if you pick one of these guys up. You're gonna see there some golden color right around the edge. A golden ring will turn him over and take a look at the bottom. Look at that nice finish. A pretty deep golden color. It hasn't turned to brown. It's not too dark. That's gonna make for a really great snappy cookie. Look at that break. Delicious. We've used some of our tools to make up these cookies. That stand mixer back there with the paddle attachment really whipped things together. Got that sugar and butter creamed up Really nice, super airy. That's key to making these crisp cookies. Then that parchment paper came in really handy when we twisted things up and compressed that dough and these Silpat mats were perfect for baking on. Look at how these came out. They look amazing. The bottoms are just right. So using these tools and the techniques I've showed you, you're gonna really be able to up your game in the kitchen with your cookies. Then, once you have that nailed down, you could move forward and make them your own and test out different recipes. Maybe add some cocoa powder. Get some chocolate a witness going, or you could add different nuts. You can roll them out, cut home into shaped cookies. There's all kinds of things you could do here, so let's do this. Let's have some fun 8. Maple Walnut Scones Part 1: moving on to our next recipe. We're going to get in the scones own and mix up some maple walnut scones. One of my personal favorites. Scones fall into the category of quick breads, which means that they are 11 without yeast and instead use something like baking soda or baking powder, as we're gonna use today. Um, my favorite scones are the types that are crumbling and have like a nice textural bite. I don't like a smooth, homogeneous, boring scone. I'm gonna show you how to make my favorite scones today. We've got all of our ingredients laid out here for our maple walnut scones, starting with 2.5 cups of all purpose flour, one tablespoon of baking powder, a teaspoon of fine salt, a teaspoon of ground cinnamon, 1/4 cup of granulated sugar, then one stick, which is about 1/2 cup of unsalted butter. We want that really cold, Ah, half cup of pretty, roughly chopped toasted walnuts. I toasted those guys in the oven at 3 50 for about eight minutes to get that nice, nutty flavor. Then we've got to eggs at room temperature. Ah, half cup of butter milk. I liked the tanginess that this lens to our baked goods two tablespoons of maple syrup. So that's everything for the scones. Then we're going to use one egg to make a nice egg wash on the top. So we get that beautiful sheen on. We're gonna make a glaze. Cinnamon maple glaze. So we've got a cup here of powdered sugar that we're in. A sift about two tablespoons of maple syrup, one teaspoon of cinnamon and just a splash of cream. We'll begin by adding our dry ingredients or cinnamon. Our salt are baking powder and our sugar to our flower. Then we're just gonna mix those guys together real quick with a whisk just until they're fully blended up. Perfect. Set that aside. Now we're gonna cut our butter into little half inch cubes. I'm gonna grab my cutting board. Drop this guy on here now He's really cold. You don't want to handle it too much because you really want that cold butter. That's how you're going to get that crumbly texture in your sculpts. So taking your bench knife cut this guy right in half, Then I like to turn it and cut it in half this direction. Kind of got four long pieces. Then you're just going to take this, Cut him into little cubes. Perfect. Set that aside and bring back your flower. Just gonna drop the's in right into the flower. Make sure they're broke up, Broken up, not broke up. They're not in a relationship. Maybe they are. I don't know. Okay, I think I got all those guys perfect. And then just kind of toss him around in that flower just so that butter gets coated gently . Here is where we're going to get into it with the pastry blender. So grab this handy little tool and you're just gonna rock in here and cut that butter into the flour. I'd like to turn my bolas. I go so I can really incorporate all of those pieces. Sometimes they stick right on there. All you have to do is just use your hands. Remove that. Since it's cold, it's sticking, which is good. Okay. And then continue. Just continue to do this. It's going to take a few minutes span in with my hands up. Okay? Just keep spinning again. Stuck on. Let's get it off of there. Beautiful. And again just keep on going. You're going to continue this cutting process until you've got little chunks about the size of peas or large pearls. We're getting pretty close here. Show you that texture. You see, I've got these nice little pearl pea size shapes. They're a little bit big. We'll just do a little more. But you think we're set? Looks nice. It's pretty rough still. Then we're gonna take those chopped walnuts. Sprinkle those guys in, give him a nice little stir to incorporate them. Lovely. Now we're going to incorporate our eggs into our buttermilk, So I like to just crack my eggs right here on the counter straight in that way, I don't get any big chunks of shell in my bowl. Hopefully, my measuring cups to fantastic. And then I just mix my maple syrup right in there as well. And then we're just gonna give this guy and nice little whisk until it's fully mixed together. Break up those yolks. Should he use a bigger one? All good. Okay, That looks pretty much mixed. Were good there. Set the society, bring this back over, and then we're gonna take that special again and make a little well in the center. We're gonna pour about 2/3 of this mixture into that. Well, okay, a little bit more. Great. Now we're just gonna fold this in. So I like to turn my bowl and scraped from the outside in just to fold that stuff together . You don't want to over mix here. That's key. Gently fold until all of that wet mixture is incorporated. With that dry, we're still crumbly. That's nice. And now we're just gonna drizzle the rest in here and continue folding just until we've got it mixed up. And enough rotate and fold. We want a rough, scrappy dough here. That's what's gonna give you those textural, crunchy, delicious scones. So we're pretty much mixed. We've got some flowery bits. You can still see some big chunks of butter in there. That's perfect. 9. Maple Walnut Scones Part 2: our dough is ready to go. I've brought in a cutting board because we're gonna be cutting some scum shapes and some tools. So we're just gonna Sprinkle this lightly with some flour right there on our clean work surface? Gonna take that crumbly dough and just turn it right out onto that work surface. Great. So we're just gathering the dough here. We don't want to overwork the dough because that's gonna break down that butter, and it's going to start to melt, which will lose that texture. So keep it rough. We like it rough. Um, you can hear just form one ball or one disc and cut that into six. Really big, like American size scones. I like to cut it in half and do two separate disks and have a little bit smaller. More bites, high schools, better for sharing. So we're just gathering that together. It's already pretty much gathered in Sprinkle a little bit here, okay. And then I'm gonna take that bench knife and cut it right in half, just like we did with our shortbread cookies Set one side aside, a little bit more flour. Just gather this into a nice round Okay. See, we still got that rough texture. That's great. You're just gonna gently pet this down until you have a disk that's maybe six inches, 5 to 6 inches around, little more some. Okay, that's great. Pat it down till it's an inch thick, and then using either that bench knife or your sharp knife, you're gonna cut this in half and then cut each half into thirds, making three little bite size triangular scones. We'll transfer these little guys right onto our Silpat lined baking sheet. Over here, they see that texture. We've got some texture in there. Still, that's great. You want to keep that UN same thing with our second half of the dough, so just pulling it together gently. Simple, patted down. It's an inch thick. At this point, you could pat it down, and you could use a biscuit cutter and cut out rounds if you wanted round scones. I personally I like these little triangular ones, so it's easier to Okay, we're good there. Sliced that guy in half. Look at all this rich, crumbly texture cut into thirds place and slice perfect. We got all these six little wedges we're gonna transfer them right over here to our Silpat mind. Baking sheet on and you can see just going to space them out evenly. And now they're ready for an egg wash. Our oven has been pre heating at 350 degrees, and it's just about ready. So we're going to mix up an egg wash here real quick. Just crack one egg into a little bowl simple, and then take a tiny whisk and whisk it up just until it's smooth and mixed. Good there. Bring these guys back over. We're gonna grab that pastry brush again. And you guys have seen this before. We just dip lightly into that egg wash, and they were going to just lightly brush all sides of the scone. This is going to give our scones a really nice sheen when they come out of the oven, which we're also gonna glaze them. But I really like the way the sheen looks. I think it makes them look really pro, and it also just adds to the whole experience and the texture of those guys. Perfect. Okay, see, these guys have got that crumble still, which is nice, perfect, So those are ready to bake in the oven at 350 degrees 10. Maple Walnut Scones Part 3: So we're making the smaller scones. They take 20 to 25 minutes in the oven at 350 degrees. The larger scones, those air. Maybe going to be 30 or 35 minutes. We're about halfway in, 12 minutes in. So we're gonna open this up, and then we're gonna just pull these out, rotate the racks and rotate the pants just because I don't totally trust my oven. And I like to make sure that I'm fully baking everything. Even there we are. Let's check back in about 10 minutes. Okay? You got 10 minutes. Get a drink. We're going to make our maple cinnamon glaze for our maple walnut scones now. So I've got a cup of powdered sugar going to just dump in my cinnamon here. And then we got a sift this sugar so you can use a fine, much receive and just sift away right into your bowl. I just sit these together. It makes my life easier. Okay. You can also use a spatula and push it through. It's a little bit quicker. Andi saves you some time, so just smash that through until you've got that all cleared out. It's like magic. Look at that were set there. Then all we have to do now is take our two tablespoons of maple syrup. Pour it right in there on just a little splash of cream. Then we're gonna whisk it together. No, it doesn't look like it's totally gonna mix up. First. It looks like there's way too much powdered sugar, but there's not promising. It's incorporated real quick. And then when you're done with this, it tastes honestly, just like a maple bar, which is like one of my favorite flavors of all time. See, it's still little dry. So now minds a little bit thick, just too thin that out. You can actually add just a kiss of either the maple syrup or a little bit more cream. If it's too thin, just add a little bit more sifted powdered sugar. So since my glaze is a little bit on the thick side, I'm just gonna add a kiss of maple syrup. And then I'm gonna mix that up until I get my desired consistency. You wanted to kind of be runny. It's not quite there. It's pretty close. More maple. Don't mind if I do and whisk again. We want it running enough so we can just drizzle it right over baked scones. That looks pretty great to me. So our glazes ready? As soon as those scones come out, we can get to drizzle in. I've transferred my scones from the hot bacon sheet to a cooling rack on top of another baking sheet, and here we have our glaze that we whipped up. So we've got a nice consistency there. See that running down? It's perfect. And then we get messy here. We don't have to be perfect. We're just gonna use this little whisk, and we're gonna take it on top of our scholars and just drizzle right on there. Look at that. A nice little stripe. Perfect. You want to wait until these scones have cooled down a little bit that way? You know, this glaze doesn't melt right on there. Beautiful. And you're just gonna repeat on all 12 of your little mini scums? That looks good, little drizzy one more and then you'll repeat with your second try. Are icing has been setting up for about 15 or 20 minutes. It's not tacky anymore. It's the perfect consistency now to dive in and eat this guy up. So let's talk about texture. We can take a look at this scone here. You can see there's a lot of texture going on The way we achieved that was with our cold, cold butter and that pastry blender that we cut the butter and flour together with. That's how we get this crumble. That is key. All right, so let's take a look at the inside here. That's nice that you want to just bite into that guy. Looks great. So, ice cold butter pastry blender. We used our Silpat mat. We used our pastry brush. We covered it all. Now you've got your building block and you could move forward. Try some different flavor combos. Once you nail this down, maybe you want to do a sour lemon cherry scone. I got that on the block making the goods dot com persimmons comb. I got that one too. So good. And like a coconut vibe. I have that going to so check my blawg outlook for some scones. Get in there getting scones own 11. Lemon Herb Dinner Rolls Part 1: All right, let's get going on our lemon herb dinner rules. So this is 11 dough that uses yeast to sort of kick. Start the fermentation process in the dough that, um, fermentation process begins by using this yeast toe, break down the sugars and convert them into two different things. Carbon dioxide and alcohol. That co two is what gives you those light, fluffy, airy, pillowy rolls. It really expands up in the oven and makes them really light and fluffy. The alcohol then burns off a that point, so we've got everything we need laid out here, starting with six tablespoons of unsalted butter, plus 3 to 4 more that will use later on. Then we have two teaspoons of honey, a cup of whole milk, two and 1/4 teaspoons of our dry, active east that was coming, those little packets. So that's one of those packets. One large egg room temperature, three cups of all purpose flour and then a little bit more, just in case we need it. Two tablespoons of sugar, a teaspoon of salt and then I like to use about a tablespoon of coarse sea salt that I just Sprinkle on top to give these rules a little bit of crunch and texture, and we've got our herbs. So we have rosemary and thyme here, like that flavor combo, and then the zest of a single lemon and one teaspoon of olive oil. That's all the ingredients you need to make these awesome lemon herb dinner rolls we're going to melt are six tablespoons of butter just over a low to medium low heat in a small saucepan. So just light this guy up and let her go. Looks like our butter is good and melted, so we're just gonna bring it over here. And now we're going to stir in our two teaspoons of honey. Just add that guy. I get it all great. Stir that in and then we're gonna quickly stir in our cup of milk. Whole milk. Lovely. So are ideal temperature. Here is 110 degrees. I'm gonna take it's temp real quick. It's probably cooled down too much, so we might have to pop it back on that heat real quickly. That looks like we need a little heat. Looks like we're right at that sweet spot of 110 degrees. That's the ideal temperature for mixing your yeast with your melted butter. If it's too hot, that yeast is just gonna die and nothing's gonna become of it. If it's too cool, it's never going to develop, and it's never gonna grow. So 100 and 10 degrees is key going to slide this over. Bring over our mixing bowl and we're going to pour in our dry, active yeast here and then stir in Are melted butter mixture. Perfect. It's all mixed together. You can start if you want to, just to make sure you don't have any clumps of yeast. And now we wait about 10 minutes and it's gonna bloom up beautifully. You'll see. Look at that bloom. It's beautiful. It's foamy. It's really worked its way up. So we're great there. It's been about 10 minutes. Now we're going to add our flower, salt and sugar, so I'm just gonna Sprinkle my sultan here. Gram, I sugi Sprinkle that in there, just like the West for these together Really quickly. Perfect. Dump those right into that mixture. Nice and we're gonna add one egg. Just cracked. Like I am lovely. We're ready to mix. We've got our mix. We're gonna lock it in place. Now we're going to use our dough hook with our stand mixer. Who's that guy on? Lock it down and we're gonna turn up to a medium speed for about 5 to 8 minutes until it really starts to incorporate. While my mixers doing work over there, I am finally besting my lemon and I finally chopped my herbs. We are in business right now. If you take a peek in here, you're going to see that the dough is sort of Colome to that hook and pulled away from the sides. That's when you know you're ready. So now we're just going to add our herbs and then mix for about another minute. Our herbs and lemon zest. Agus. Okay, turn it back up to a medium speed 12. Lemon Herb Dinner Rolls Part 2: our dough is ready for our first shaping over here. So now we're going to take a medium to large mixing bowl on. We're going to grease up this beefcake, so we're gonna pour that olive oil right in on usar pastry brush too. Lightly grease up the inside of our bowl all the way up. Looks fantastic. Okay, set that aside. Grab our dough. Oh, it hasn't really locked in. Okay, bring this on over and get that all of that dough off the hook. We're just going to turn this dough out onto a clean surface. It's really soft and sticky and supple. That's a good thing. In this case, a lot of cases, okay. Should be basically one big ball of dough. Scrape it out. That looks good. Okay. It's really sticky here. Since this dough is a little on the sticky side, we're gonna incorporate just a pinch of flour. This is where that extra flour comes in and we're going to use that handy dandy bench knife and scrape up. Look at that. Now we're not sticking. I like to use the knife to sort of scrape underneath and lift and make sort of a round shape. Get that started. Okay, set that aside and they're gonna take your two hands, and you're going to shape this into a bull or a ball shape. So we're gonna come from underneath and rock it around in a circle. Okay? Slowly. You're gonna push a little bit and give it some tension under there until you've got, like, a nice, firm little ball. Looks great. Use this. Hey, again to scrape that up and then we're gonna plop him right into that Greece step bowl. Perfect. Doesn't have to be a perfect ball. It's fine. If it's not, then we're going to cover with just a simple cheesecloth. Or you can use just saran wrap just a light cover. And now we've gotta wait about an hour and 1/2 for that guy to rise up. So I suggest chilling out with your dog may be having a glass of rose. A something nice like that. There we go. Just waiting on that dough to rise up. So we're hanging. Were chilling with our doggie. Good doggie. Good doggie. Um, just checking my feeds over here and drinking some rose. A not so bad you want so he wasn't. Roses do bed. Dogs can drink wine. Sorry way. We are ready to shape our rolls. The dough has risen up, and it's time. So we're gonna start with two of these eight inch baking dish is I like to use these vintage Pyrex ones because they bake up real nice and they look adorable. So we're gonna take that pastry brush again, dip him into our melted butter and just lightly coat the inside. That way, when the rules bake up, they're not sticking to the dish. We'll do both of those. No problem. Same thing just coating that in some. But, uh um, it looks good. Okay, it's time for the big reveal here when it take the cover off of this guy. Hey, and take a look at that dough. He's really doubled in size. He's got a nice spring Innis, and that means it's ready to go. So let's take this dough, turn it out onto our surface Here. It's nice and oiled, which is good and await my hands. Now we're gonna weigh it out. Um, just to make sure we get a uniform size. So we're using that kitchen scale here. We're going to put our bowl on there and tear it out, as they say, so that we're reset to zero were weighing in grams. We're gonna put this guy back in, get a total weight, which looks like it's about 776 grams. So we're making 18 dinner rolls. We need to do a little math. I can't do that in my head. So I need to use my my phone calculator and see what that's gonna be. So what I say 7 76 7 76 Divided by 18. 43. So somewhere in the 43 to 45 range is going to be a perfect sized rules. So we've got our dough here. We're gonna take this bench knife again and just start to chop off chunks like to cut a strip first. And then hopefully I can guess somewhere near 45 terror, this guy out again. So we're back at zero Grams who, 63 way above. So cut off a big chunk. 58 0 sorry. 46. Okay, just a little guy. 45. That's great. Who? 38. Okay, So you're just gonna add dough until you get to that right size right about 44. 44. Perfect. 36 at a little chunk 42. You get the idea. 43. Okay, it's way. This guy 40 45. OK, so we're pretty consistent here. We're gonna continue to do that with the rest of the dough until we have 18 equal parts. So we've weighed out all of our dough into equal pieces. Remember to divide your total amount of dough in order to get that exact measurement, because it could vary a little depending on how you measure things out. So we needed 18 pieces at about 43 to 45 grams. So I've got these 18 all cut up here. Now, we're gonna take these little balls here, and then you're gonna make a C shape with your hand, and you're going to just roll the dough right around in your hand. See this action rolling, rolling, rolling until you have a perfect little ball. You can feel that tension pushing against the board and you'll know when you have a nice ball because it'll feel really great in your hand. So there we go. There, there. First of all, set that aside now, if they're kind of a funky shape, you can also just gather the dough around. It's sort of like a dumpling like this and just kind of squeeze it together. So you have, ah, ball shaped started on. Then turn that guy over on. Do that. See that C curve again? All right, so we've got that and we're rolling or feeling that tension were role in right. We've got that beautiful, another nice little ball and continue with all 18 of these. If you need that dumpling, you can pull it up. Pinch lightly, flip and again the sea really slow. You can slowly roll if you need Teoh and push into the base and really feel that tension. Build great and you'll continue with all 18. Alternatively, you could take the dough and divided into nine equal pieces instead of 18 which has essentially doubled the size of these roles and create hamburger buns. So then you could top them with sesame seeds or poppy seeds, whatever you like. Um, and you would just bake them on a parchment or on a Silpat mat spread apart in the oven individually so you'd get those nice hamburger buns. Or you could take one of these little guys, chop him into three even pieces, role three more little balls and pop him into a greased up muffin tin, which would make those cute little clover rolls that you see all the time. So you've got options. That's what I'm getting at people. Here we go. We have 18 equal pieces. He's tight, firm, little round balls. We're gonna put nine in each of our baking dishes. So about 1/2 inch from the edge, we're gonna pop in eight of these. You've got space to grow and a little guy in the center and these guys are gonna rise up for about an hour and in an hour, then we're gonna bake them. Do this both. How cute. Those will Balls are adorable. Ring around the edge, Give him some room to breathe. And a cute little guy in the center 13. Lemon Herb Dinner Rolls Part 3: there. We have it perfectly shaped roles. Now they need to rise for about an hour. So we're just gonna coat them again And just a tiny touch of butter. Just kiss nice a little Kiss the butter on these beautiful. And then we're just gonna cover with a sheet of saran wrap, and those need to rise for about an hour. You need to keep those in a warm place so they can really proof up. If it's too cold, they're not gonna proof. All right, there we go. All set. Our roles have been proofing for about an hour in our baking dishes, so they look great. You can see they've puffed up really nicely. They've proved, and they are ready to hit that oven. We've got the oven preheated at 375 degrees. So now we're gonna hit them once more liberally with some of that melted butter because these roles really stop it up. So I like to get a lot of butter on those guys. Perfect. Just using that pastry brush again. Look how handy this thing is. Here we go. Um, but it up just pop these guys right in our preheated oven one on each rack towards the center of the oven and we'll set the timer for 18 minutes. There we go. Relax. So our dinner rolls have been in right about 18 minutes. Let's take a peek and see how they look. Oh, yeah, That was great. Hot. Okay, perfect. Great. So let's take a look at these guys. We've got a nice golden brown color among the top. That's perfect. They look lovely. So now we're gonna use the rest of that butter and just really stop it on there. Give it a nice, buttery glaze. Says what makes those generals so buttery because they have a lot of butter. Beautiful. Getting all Paula Deen style here. Just go to town on that butter. Perfect. Those look amazing. Glossy, shiny and golden. Then I like to use just a little bit of crunchy sea salt flakes along the top because I like a little salty bite. I like the texture that the springs just a little surprise. Beautiful. Sprinkle that on. Yeah, we used our stand mixer with that dough hook attachment and that really changed our game. I mean, you could do this by hand. You can need by hand, of course, but that guy is gonna make your life so much easier. Then we use that bench knife to cut off the chunks of dough and weigh them out on our kitchen scale. So we have this nice uniform size we then rolled. We use that rolling technique that I showed you. I made perfect little balls. So you have these lovely, perfectly shaped roles. So then we just buttered up with that pastry brush again. And now here you have the perfect dinner roll. They're amazing. They're the best thing for Thanksgiving. You could just grab one of these little steamy guys. See that? Perfect look at that interior. Don't you just want to get in there, stop up some gravy and bite into that guy? So good. So you've got the tools, you've got the tricks, and now you know, young dough. You can do this 14. Know Yo' Dough - Wrap Up. Thank You!: All right, we're wrapping up here. We've gone over three does starting with the mixing process. Then we shaped Ardo and we baked into some beautiful lemon shortbread poppy seed cookies. We moved on to our maple walnut scones and we ended with our lemon herb dinner rules. So you've seen the processes. You've seen the method. You saw me use these 10 essential baking tools In these recipes, you've got an idea. You've got somewhere to start. I understand that some of these tools are expensive, and I get that you don't want to go out and buy it. He's right away. If you could borrow a stand mixer from someone, but if you can, you can use your hands. There's other methods you could use A hand mixer. You've got options there. These air just recommendations. What's really key is using those techniques and those tips that I showed you throughout the recipes. I want you to do your assignment now and incorporate those tips and techniques and let me know how those change your game and what you felt was most beneficial in the kitchen to you . If you want to post photos, I would love to see those. I mean, I am a food blogger, so I've got a thing for food photography. So maybe a process shot may be your finished product. I love to see. Now, if you want to just take a look at my recipes. I've got them listed below. You can also go toe baking the goods dot com and find my step by step instructional recipes there. I'm here for you. I'm here to help. I can't wait to see what you cook up. So get to know your dough because the mo Udo the mo you know, Right. Okay, guys, I can't wait to see what you bake up.