Dinner Roll Success

After a days work and two batches of dough, I finally had 12 beautiful dinner rolls that were equally delicious.  Thanks to Cooks Country, Thanksgiving dinner was complete!  The process was surprisingly easy however, I did learn a few lessons.  My first batch of rolls started out just fine and I was expecting nothing but perfection until my dough failed to rise.  I pondered what I could have done wrong and decided in the mean time to make another batch just in case.  Good thing I did because as it turns out, water temperature really does matter.  The first time, I neglected to realize that my temperatures would be in fahrenheit rather than celsius and made my water far too hot, shocking and killing the yeast.  Obviously this was a problem hence the failure to rise.  Once I repeated the recipe, making sure the water was the correct temperature, the rolls turned out just fine.  Here are a few photos of the process.

the unofficial start

As everyone knows, Thanksgiving is coming quickly and the dinner rolls that I have been planning on making are going to begin tomorrow for saturdays dinner.  The 2 day process will be mostly spent waiting for dough to rise then rise again but never the less, I am excited for this first trial.  This wasn't the plan for the official bread baking start as I have yet to get my bread book but I am hoping that the dinner rolls will be a pleasant foretaste of what is to come.  If that foretaste is not so pleasant, I suppose this blog will end.  Here's to delicious dinner rolls
Cheers!
On a completely unrelated side note, are all bloggers decent writers?  Is that a prerequisite to blogging? Because if it is, I fail.  I'm pretty sure I violate at least 10 grammatical rules in each blog never mind spelling mistakes.

the making of this blog...

I have recently been thinking about learning how to make bread.  With Thanksgiving right around the corner, I came upon an easy recipe from cooks country for dinner rolls.  Although this sounds like a great project for thanksgiving, I wanted to really learn what making bread is all about.  Through a friends blog, I came across a blog that was working through making all the breads from Bread Bakers Apprentice, a book by Peter Reinhart and Ron Manville.  It looked promising and very educational but I didn't want to just go out and buy the first thing I saw so I began to read the reviews...
After an hour or so, I ended up at Jeffrey Hamelman's Bread: A Bakers Book of Techniques and Recipes.  The first book by Reinhart had great illustrations and quite a few recipes but also gave the option of using margarine or shortening in all of the recipes.  I love butter and feel strongly about using butter in baking and I am sure that the french are not using margarine or shortening in their croissants so even giving the option of something other than butter was enough to turn me off the book.  I consequently decided that Hamelman would be the choice for me.  Now, back to Bread Bakers Apprentice or BBA as it is commonly called...
BBA has quite a following and can be found around as a sort of book club thing.  Initially, I thought the concept of baking through all the bread recipes in BBA would be exciting and rewarding but after having the margarine and shortening problem, the BBA group was quickly out for me.  Long story short, I will be baking through Hamelman's book and blogging about each bread I make.  I hope this works!