Rum Rolls: surprising the neighbors

People who are touring the Chesapeake Bay area are often surprised when they go to one of the famous fish restaurants to be served a great big cinnamon bun with rum frosting before their meal. It’s an American take on antipasto, I think. Somehow it works if you can forget what your mother told you about eating sweets before dinner and just eat it. I think the reasoning is that fish has to be prepared on the instant if it is to be good, plus itìs usually a very expensive item. Therefore, fill the customers up with a tempting and cheaper thing to keep them patient and to satisfy the hunger brought on by hours of salty breezes.

Yesterday was May Day and is celebrated in Italy with picnics and garden meals. They call it “planting May” and so we did plant May at Tina’s house last night amid the chickens, geese and cats who live there. I decided to shock and awe the Italians with those surprising rum rolls. Now that Beppe Bigazzi is gone and I am the winner, I can forge ahead with American kitchen lore and not fight a defensive battle every time I introduce a new dish.

These rum rolls are better than almost anything.

You should be wishing you were in my house yesterday afternoon. The perfume was intoxicating. Like almost all cookery, homemade rum rolls are a series of easy steps strung together, but unlike most, the rum rolls put out wonderful smells even when you aren’t doing anything to them. If you’ve only had those made in bakeries or bought at a supermarket, you may think you know what I mean, but if you undertake to make them yourself you’d better have a clothespin nearby for your nose, ot you’ll want to tear them apart with your hands before they even get cooked. Patience pays, however. Eat a boiled egg and wait for the smell of yeast, warm butter, cinnamon and melting sugar to waft through your house while they rise and then bake. Incredible.

My recipe comes from an ancient cookbook that was a wedding present some years ago. I have worked through the recipe to find the right flours to use if you are in Europe, because standard 00 flour doesn’t have enough gluten and Manitoba has too much. A warm kitchen is helpful, but if yours isn’t, you can heat the oven slightly, then turn it off and raise the dough in it with the door closed.

Rum Rolls
for the dough

1/4 cup (60 ml) warm water
1 packet dry yeast (lievita da birra and the packets are the same)
3/4 cup (180 ml) lukewarm milk
1/4 cup (53 g) sugar
1 tsp salt
1 egg
1/4 cup (56 g) soft butter
3.5 to 3.75 cups (455-488 g) flour [I use 1/3 Manitoba and 2/3 00)

For assembling the rolls you will also need:

2 tablespoons (28 g) soft butter
1/2 cup (105 g) sugar mixed with 2 teaspoons of cinnamon [do this ahead]
2 small handsul of raisins (the ones you see are enormous white Chilean raisins from Eurospin)

And to frost them you will need:

1 cup (100 g) powdered sugar
a few spoonsful of strong rum

Measure the warm water in a Pyrex cup and add the yeast granules.
In a small pan heat the milk to a simmer, then cut off the heat. Add the butter and the sugar to the milk. Let this cool to almost room temperature while you prepare the dry ingredients.

Start with the smaller amount of flour in a big bowl, and add the salt. When the milk is cool enough, pour the yeast mixture onto the flour and half the milk mixture. Beat them into the flour. I use dough hooks in my powerful Braun multi-tool and it couldn’t work better. You can also use any electric mixer or a wooden spoon and a strong arm. A very strong arm. Once incorporated fairly well, add the rest of the milk mixture and the egg and beat it in very well. The mixture should be a very soft dough, just beyond being a batter. If yours is still more a batter, add a little more flour bit by bit. Don’t worry about it too much, because you’ll get another chance to alter it after it has risen.

Scrape the bowl down nicely and then cover it well and put it in a warm place to rise. That takes from 1.5 to 1.75 hours, so you can go do something else. Micheal Ruhlman recently got sniped at for suggesting making love while a chicken cooked, so I am going to leave it up to you what to do with that time. I am not famous enough to get away with suggestions that frighten the missionaries.

When the dough is risen beautifully, you will have been noticing the yeasty perfume for a while. That is you will if you stayed home and didn’t do anything too terribly exciting. If you went shopping you’ll have missed that part. Punch it down and repeat all directions about raising the dough, it thirty minutes. This time you really can’t go shopping.

Flour a surface lightly and scrape the dough out onto it. You can see I used a big silicone rolling pad that eg sent me. It’s wonderful because it has both centimeters and inches along the edges so you can roll out to measure. Flour your hands and knead the dough to get to know the consistency. If it is still too wet knead in a little flour until you have a very soft dough, but one that holds a shape instead of flowing around the surface. Now flour a rolling pin (or an empty wine bottle if you are rolling pin deprived) and use it to roll the dough into a rectangle 9″ X 15″ ( 23 X 38 cm).

Spread the soft butter over all of the surface. I didn’t do that, because although May Day was splendid here, my butter was still much firmer than my dough, so I melted the butter a bit in a little pan then spread it with a silicone pastry brush.

Sprinkle the cinnamon-sugar mixture evenly over the dough. Distribute the raisins over it, too. Don’t leave out the raisins, because they are loaded with iron and allow you to claim these rolls are health food.

It’s very helpful to have a dough scraper like mine to help you roll this up. The dough really should be so soft that it’s hard to do. Also remember to roll up from the long side so you end up with a 15″ (38 cm) roll. Once it’s rolled, cut into about 16 pieces. Use the dough scraper or a wide spatula to transfer the rolls to a buttered baking dish of 9″ X 13″ (or 2 smaller ones) or into buttered muffin cups. I’ve been served rum rolls made in muffin cups, but I have never cooked them that way, besides I don’t have 16 muffin cups. Do you?

Cover the dish lightly with a clean kitchen towel and leave it to rise once again about 35 to 40 minutes, until they’ve doubled in size again. This time the sugar, butter and cinnamon start to invade the yeast smell and children, neighbors and cooks start to behave in unpredictable ways. When they are fluffy and puffy, heat the oven to 350F or
170° C. When it’s hot, slide the rolls into the oven and stand back. Invasion is perfectly possible if the windows are open. Bake them about 25 to 30 minutes.

When they are golden and just cooked through (I pulled up a bit of a center one to see that the dough was not at all still raw) remove them and after a couple of minutes, upend the whole dish over a cooling rack.

Let them cool to just warm while you make the frosting. Put the powdered or confectioner’s sugar into a small bowl, add a few grains of salt and then, spoonful by spoonful, stir in rum until you have made a fairly liquid glaze. Turn the rolls over onto a board or baking paper and use the spoon to smear the frosting sketchily over the rolls. Donìt overdo it, because they are much better with a suggestion of rum rather than a reek of it.

Once the frosting has dried, which takes very little time, you can gently separate the rolls and store them any way you like, although a wall safe would probably be best. I piled them onto a big plate and wrote a little note about the area they come from and the tradition for eating them before fish dinners. “Oh, those crazy Americans!” they cried as they demolished them before, during and after supper. I supposed that Italians would nibble at a sweet antipasto and leave plenty for Tina’s Sunday morning breakfast, but not a crumb was left.

The nicest part was that these rum rolls inspired a really great conversation about what is American cuisine, how is it different and why are there no American restaurants in Italy. There are, because every steakhouse is American inspired, but Italians have adopted that so completely they don’t even know it. I had a wonderful time covering, as best I could, all the continents, north and south and bragging about all the great foods that are American in origin and how well we cook them. I’m afraid I took some credit for great Mexican ideas, but heck, they’ll find me out quick enough if they trouble to look into it. And no, I am not opening an American restaurant because I am too old and too lazy. Let them try all the recipes in the Buona Cucina American pages!