Such crust!

Published 9:00 pm Tuesday, June 7, 2005

Baking bread at home has been out of style for years – for good reason. These days, you can count on finding terrific baguettes, focaccia or country breads at the market or bakery, so why mess with kneading and rising and all that pioneer-woman stuff?

Still, great bread and great just-baked bread are two different things, and something’s been lost along the way: the yeasty aroma that lingers in the air and makes a home seductively inviting, the toothsome contrast of crisp crust and soft, warm center that you get only when the bread’s served straight from the oven.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there were a postmodern way to reap the real rewards of freshly baked bread without either resorting to a bread machine or turning yourself into an olive-studded, obsessively artisanal Europhile loaf nerd?

Meet the crusty roll. It fits into your weekend, gives your casual Sunday supper a lift and delivers all the warm, fresh deliciousness you’re looking for. You don’t have to wait for rolls to cool before slicing as you do with loaves, so you can pop them in the oven as your guests are arriving, wow them with the appetizing aromas, and then toss the hot rolls into a basket as everyone’s sitting down to the meal.

There are crusty rolls for every occasion and all kinds of cooks. Every bread-loving cuisine has a favored crisp-crusted roll: round sourdough French rolls, dark rye rolls with slashed tops sprinkled with coarse salt and caraway seed in Germany and Austria, and Mexican bolillos.

Most cookbooks will tell you that any bread can be made into rolls and that obtaining a crisp crust is the result of adding steam during the baking process, but these truths are better applied to some recipes than others.

My standby recipe for hard rolls is a simple, basic bread – just yeast, salt, flour and water. It’s best made by hand, so I get the satisfying experience of kneading (for which I always give myself upper-body workout credits), but the heavy-duty stand mixer produces great results, too.

I make the dough in the late morning on a weekend and leave it to rise for a couple of hours while I run errands or go to the gym. (This recipe takes longer to rise than many breads because there’s no sugar.) In late afternoon, I form the dough into rolls and leave it to rise again.

Come suppertime, our meal of chili or a pot of soup is suddenly special – delightfully rustic, a homey combination of hearty flavors.

To achieve the right crust on these rolls, I brush the tops with water and then, just when I’m putting the rolls in to bake, I toss a tray full of ice cubes into a small cake pan that’s been in the oven while it heats. The ice cubes immediately sizzle and steam and I quickly shut the oven door.

Other crust-enhancing techniques vary with recipes, but I use the ice cube trick with all crusty rolls.

If you want a darker crust on these basic rolls, you can brush them with milk or a beaten egg mixed with two tablespoons of milk. For poppy seed rolls, brush with an egg white mixed with one tablespoon of water and sprinkle with poppy seeds.

I’d been searching for years for a bread recipe that would allow me to jazz up a Sunday breakfast or brunch. (I couldn’t see getting up at 4 a.m. so bread could rise.) Though some bakers say you can let any dough rise in the refrigerator overnight and then bake it the next day, I’d never had the nerve to experiment.

Then I found a recipe in Bernard Clayton Jr.’s “The Complete Book of Breads” that required overnight refrigeration for proper crust formation. It’s a loafer’s dream: Dough is made in the food processor, it rises once (and that’s while you sleep) and it turns into smooth, crisp-crusted whole-wheat rolls with a delicate honey-lemon flavor.

Your food processor might not be up to the challenge of kneading this dough (mine isn’t); it might stall at some point. Never mind. It’s worth doing the mixing quickly in the processor and then turning the dough out and kneading awhile by hand. If you have a heavy-duty electric stand mixer, you can use that.

These rolls are brushed with oil before refrigerating, so the texture is both chewy and crisp. The crust is a perfect contrast to the slightly sweet, lightly wheat center with the surprising lemon notes from the zest.

I love fast-rising yeast and often use it when making rolls, though I have to confess, I still leave plenty of time for rising.

Manufacturers of fast-rising yeast say using it cuts rising time in half, but variables such as weather, the temperature of your kitchen and whether there’s a “proofing” (very, very low) setting on your oven are also important in figuring out the amount of time – with fast-rise or regular yeast – your dough will need to rise.

You can’t hurry bread. But with crusty rolls, once they’re out of the oven, you don’t have to wait.