Cheesey Rolls

  

  
Here's another thing to do with the pizza dough/baguette recipe. I had to come up with a thing that I could take to a potluck that didn't involve a trip to the store. I'd already decided that I was going to be in the house all day, so I might as well make rolls, right?

Start with the same recipe for pizza dough, with the following changes: use half whole wheat flour, add 1 tablespoon of butter, and use half as much salt.

Knead the dough until it's smooth- I run it in the bread machine for 20 minutes. Then let it rest for an hour or until it doubles in size. Grate a half pound of cheddar. Roll the dough out until it's half an inch thick. Shoot for a rectangle about 2 feet long by 1 foot wide. Sprinkle on the cheese, and really smush it in. Roll the dough up tightly so you have a rope of dough about 2 feet long and about 2-3 inches thick. Cut off slices of the rope about 1 1/2 to 2 inches thick. Set them on an oiled baking pan about 2 inches apart, and let them rise for about an hour. Bake at 375 for 25-30 minutes, or until there are delicious brown bits of cheese oozing out.

If you want to get fancy, you can add chopped herbs, either in the cheese itself, or sprinkled on the outside, which is what I did.

A couple things that might help:

1. If you let the rolls rise in the oven next to a pan of hot water, the outside layers will stay moist, and hopefully, continue to expand at the same rate as the insides. I already had something else in the oven, so I couldn't do that. I think they'd look prettier if I had. One of my rolls exploded out of its layers.

2. It's important to roll the dough tightly. As it rises, any air pockets you leave in it will expand, and tend to make the rolls loose their shape. Pressing the cheese firmly onto the dough helps with this.

3. Flour the surface you roll the dough on. The dough is rather soft and sticky.

These are best hot out of the oven, like all rolls, but they didn't last more than a couple hours so I can't say after that.