Baking lateral yeast rolls and how I sneaked poppy into them

I honestly wanted to bake bread. Nothing sweet, no huge amount of butter, let alone piles of chocolate or spoonfuls of vanilla…. But I am spineless in regard to cake and cookies.

Last week was a hectic one: I am volunteering in an NGO which cares for refugees, the very old and young and for people with no income and social participation. We had board meetings, made a gifting campaign for women (because of international women’s day), there was the annual reception and two demonstrations. I only tell you this to justify a totally unnecessary and expensive buying: Lateral cooking by Niki Segnit.
Since I started using Paprika app to collect recipes and to document my modifications of these recipes, I only buy very very very special cookbooks – and Lateral cooking is such a book. With over 700 pages it is full of stories, wisdom, recipes and humor. I am in love.

I met this cute sheep at the supermarket, no idea why it had to work at the cash desk

I was able to read through the first hundreds of pages before my lust to bake something enflamed. I was sitting with sweating hands bend over this book completely focussed on how to get some yeast. Yes, yeast. Foremost known as the least bought item at the supermarket. If I can remember it was never a problem to find at least 60 or more packages of fresh yeast at the cooling area of every supermarket. But this was before Corona. My baking lust started on Saturday evening and I was able to buy two packets of yeast on Tuesday. And believe me, we have no shortage of supermarkets here. I am not sure what people want to do with the yeast? Baking brioche with 40 degrees C fever?
But ok, I had my yeast and baking could start.

I have chosen a milk roll recipe for 500 g flour, which will give me plenty of dough to play around with. Contrary to my behavior in sewing (read here about my absurd stupid mistakes while sewing pants) I wanted to first follow the recipe to a T. Ok, not true… I used less yeast as I already knew that I will bake the dough the next day, so it had plenty of time to rise. Worked out fine, the dough was like a miracle of yeast, growing and growing. Sometimes I guess I only bake with yeast because I love it so much to see it grow :-DDD

So, next day I rolled the dough into small balls, let them rise another time during which the oven heated up. I baked them longer than the recipe asked for, but I guess every oven is different (or perhaps my oven thermometer is not accurate... who knows). They came out beautifully but tasted bland. Groan. The author wrote that the recipes are low in salt… I read it…. and I already was a bit suspicious while checking the measurements… but I did not listen to my intuition. But clever me, I only used about a third of the dough for rolls, the rest was sleeping in the fridge.

Two days later I finally could give in into my love of sugar and fat (wait… there was no fat involved, but it sounded good): I used the rest of the dough to make poppy seed rolls with apples. I have done it the lazy way with a bough poppy seed mixture for baking which waited to be used.

I rolled out the dough into a thin rectangle, creamed it with the poppy seed mixture and sprinkled tiny apple cubes over the poppy seeds. Then I rolled the whole thing into a tight sausage, cut it into pieces, and flattened them with my hand. Again, a bit of rising time and then they went into the oven to turn into something wonderful.

I directly tested them… and after I had eaten the third poppy roll, I was sure, it is a lovely recipe.

I hope you are all well and are not living in an area with a high infection rate. But if you do and are well confined to your apartment (and are hopefully well enough to read), I highly recommend Niki Segnit‘s book.