4 Levels of Cinnamon Rolls: Amateur to Food Scientist | Epicurious

Hi, I'm Emily and I'm a level one chef. I'm Gabrielle and I'm a level two chef. I'm Tracy and I've been a pastry chef for over nine years. I bake probably once a month, very rarely anything. As elegant as

cinnamon

rolls

. I used to make them all the time with my Grandma and Nana. When we had leftover dough from making nut

rolls

, we would take the leftover dough and mix it into rolls. Cinnamon rolls are usually made with fresh yeasted dough. like a brioche, but I wanted to take it a step further so I decided to use a croissant dough for my

cinnamon

rolls, so to make our croissant dough, we're going to start with the actual portion of Trump's arjo croissant.

I love cinnamon rolls. I wish I could make them like homemade from scratch, but the only way I know is with pre-made pizza dough, which contains flour and probably a few other things, completely safe, so we're going to put two types of flour in all of them. -Purpose and bread flour, which is a high gluten flour, so I just added sugar to the butter, which is really the crux of this dough recipe because it is a buttery, sugary dough, you need a little salt While it's still mixing, we want to go ahead and prepare our yeast.

I'm going to put in my milk, which is also warm room temperature water, which will be incorporated into our cold, wet ingredients and we'll dissolve our ecig. It has that delicious thing that will turn it into a beautiful dough and then I'm going to break it up today, today we're going to combine our wet ingredients with our dry. I like to mix my wet ingredients first and then I like to add just a little bit of flour, so I keep making batches. to put dry and like my wet ingredients we're going to combine this until it comes together.

I know I'm going to transfer it to my bank and now I'm going to spread it out real quick into some kind of rectangle, oh. It's so weird that it looks like a villain from an anime I've been watching and it gets complicated if you have a phobia of getting your hands a little dirty, so I don't know, maybe you don't want to use this method, okay? What I'm going to do now is just knead it until it's a little smooth. I'm going to transfer this to my plastic wrap. The next thing we're going to do with it is transfer it to this other bowl.

I'm going to go ahead and oil it well, we're going to give it another hour and a half to two hours to dry and do its job, then you're going to take this and put it in the refrigerator for about 60 to 90 minutes, it needs to chill. down right now it's too sticky to roll, so we'll give it a little neck. I'm just going to spread this out, which will take me about an hour or two tada, a beautiful giant mass that's been rising for about two hours. So I just pulled my Joe out of the refrigerator he sat for about an hour and a half and I have my butter prepped and ready to go.

We're going to lock our butter in our dough so that we can Greek in our rolling. At this point in the process you want to make sure you have a good amount of flour on your workspace and because you greased it, it should be changed right away and now we're going to pat it into an oblong shape because we want to get as close to a rectangle. I'm going to roll this dough into about a 12 inch square. For some reason McStays is round when I roll it up, it won't be a perfect rectangle. You usually use parchment paper, but if you do, I think. is working against I probably should have put flour on the parchment paper.

There are a couple of factors that if it sticks you may want to retrace your steps and then backtrack a bit, second try here. I will bloom it whenever you want. working with any type of joe that has yeast, like brioche pizza, any type of bread dough you want to work very quickly, rolling out the dough should take no more than five minutes, ten to 12 minutes, what's really important here is not overwork our dough. I don't know what happens if you overwork the dough, but my intuition is that it's not good if you're working with pizza dough and you overwork it, it will essentially become rock-like, so I'm very happy with this, we have a square cut. about 12 inches, my edges are not too thick or too thin, just write like Goldilocks would say.

Now we're going to take our bombardment or our butter portions and enclose them inside our dough and now. We'll start folding our flaps and covering our butter. You should have a nice square. What we are going to do is extend it and now we will proceed to fold it into a book. This is our first turn. I'm going to make two of these to give us enough layers. Now this is kept in the refrigerator for at least an hour. Honestly, it's okay if it has little holes and things like that because they're like places to pass the filling through.

You know, yum, yum, so this is a dough. that we've done one more series of books, we light it up and then let it sit overnight so we can work with it again and roll it out to distinguish the cinnamon buns before we start putting the filling in. I would like to spread it with milk. I'm just going to take some room temperature butter and spread it all over my plate of pizza dough to put a little bit of beaten egg on top, that way we can seal it. It's something my Nana does. I want mine to taste as good as hers, so that's what I know, it's beautiful, your beautiful baby.

I'm going to set the dough aside and start with the filling so we're going to start by just creaming our butter and our sugar now we're going to add light brown sugar we're going to combine the brown sugar and a little bit of cinnamon. I'm just going to beat them together, we're using maple gerrae, the delicious Berlin is a huge pinch of salt and then we just have some furniture and here we have a homemade cinnamon bun filling, so now I'm going to put my cinnamon and sugar mixture on it dark. I love Nutella. I love Nutella, so I'm going to go ahead and paint it.

It feels like I'm painting a picture on a piece of dough and my paint is my Nutella, what's more fun than that, so now we're going to take our filling and spread it all the way, like less is more for this. I'm going to add a little cinnamon. I think Nutella with cinnamon goes very well. The next step we're going to move on to is simply shaping our cinnamon rolls. We will completely roll each cinnamon bun individually. It's very soft. just tender and cuddly because it's done, it might fall apart, honestly I stand by the theory that if it breaks a little it's fine, you're already using store bought pizza dough, who are you kidding?

We want to cut one inch strips, we just keep going. and start rolling it up yeah so here's my hello it's funny because it looks like a burrito it looks like a giant burrito we're just going to cut it up so try to keep it an inch away. I will try to do this very carefully. of squish and this goes in the can so we're going to put these muffins in two 9 inch round cake pans we're going to start with the ends to practice a little because they are the worst kids to touch that's no big deal have let's put it together there we have our two molds and now I'm just going to butter the top because everything turns out better with a little more butter, this also makes it nice and golden on the top and gives it that golden color when the dough is Coming out now, we're just going to go in and sprinkle them with a little bit of sugar.

Once you have finished rolling all the cinnamon buns, you will place them in a warm place so they can begin the proofing process, let them take a little. a nap before heading back into the oven, which is what will make our Auntie's Cinnamon Bun Clips light and fluffy. You'll see that they are actually doubling in size again. You won't recognize the one there, so these have about 45 minute trials, let's take a look, they are as nice as new. We're going to bake these in the oven at about 375 for 20 to 25 minutes until they're golden brown and delicious, so let's do it traditionally, the cinnamon buns are glazed with cream. cheese glaze, but of course I wanted to intensify it and we'll use marscapone instead.

Marscapone is basically an Italian cream cheese and I really love it for baked goods, so we're just making a kind of frosting. I'm just going to mix this heavy butter whipping cream here with about a quarter cup of milk, so after I finish mixing in this last little bit of sugar, I'm going to go ahead and pour it into the next rack and of course some salt and now I'm going to start adding water little by little and then we'll try to get it to something nice and lazy. I really like a fluffy, foamy frosting so I like to mix it on high to really get a lot of air in, we're not looking to aerate this we just want it all to come together, yeah I think that's probably the kind of texture I'd like for that you can spray that, oh, I think the lady is done.

Dense, these are fresh. They smell great out of the oven, so they just came out of the oven. They inflated just the right amount. You need to let them cool after coming out of the oven for 15 to 20 minutes so the glaze doesn't melt. It's not melting all over so while they're cooling a little bit I'm going to take some regular sugar and ground cinnamon and I'm going to mix them together and now we're going to toss each hot bun into our cinnamon sugar so my cinnamon rolls are baked and now I'm going to put a little glaze on them.

I'm going to make it better, something like this, but pretend they're pretty, I'll just take a spoonful, twist it, go ahead and put in as much as you want. I'm just going to I'm going to put a little more nuts on this I feel like more frosting is better and then we're going to frost them with our marscapone frosting these are my cinnamon buns and here are my cinnamon rolls here are the croissants cinnamon buns with our marscapone glaze very well our cinnamon The rolls are ready to eat, so I'm going to take a bite that works.

The dough is buttery and fluffy. She's so good. I think I'll have to teach this in my next croissant class. Some people call them cinnamon buns while others call them. them, cinnamon rolls, rolls, who knows, but usually the cinnamon rolls are rolled in the oven and covered with a glaze and the cinnamon rolls are baked with syrup and taken out of their plate, once cooked, each chef used a different dough as the base of her cinnamon rolls that Emily uses. store-bought pizza dough Gabriele made a homemade enriched yeast dough and Tracy made a laminated croissant dough.

Each of these masses is distinguished by its fat content. Emily's store-bought pizza dough is known as lean dough because it has a minimal amount of fat. Gabrielle's Homemade Dough started out as a lean dough, but the addition of buttermilk and eggs creates an enriched dough that will taste absolutely delicious. Tracy made a laminated dough by layering it with thin sheets of butter that act to soften the dough by shortening the length. gluten strands and prevents them from clumping together. Emily's lean dough has more gluten development, which contributes to the rolls' crispy exterior and airy interior. Gluten also provides elasticity, which poses a challenge for rolling out dough.

The enrichment in Gabrielle's dough provides a soft interior and tender crumb. Tracy's laminated dough will become flaky because the water naturally found in the butter layers will produce steam and puff up each layer individually. Our chefs chose different ways to fill their cinnamon rolls. Emily covered the dough with softened butter and sprinkled cinnamon and sugar. Gabrielle's Nutella spread and cinnamon on her dough and Tracy made a compound butter with sugar, cinnamon, maple syrup and bourbon, delicious bourbon, the sugar in the filling is hygroscopic or loves water, it attracts water from the dough, which causes the dough to dry out quickly and go stale after baking, if you prefer. soft muffins and I still want to use sugar in the filling keeps the sugar hydrated like Gabrielle did with her Nutella.

You should start calling it a Nutella bun because that's really what it is or like Tracy did with her compound butter, a European butter would be a good way to distinguish that all of our chefs used a lot of cinnamon in the filling cinnamon cinnamon giving the buns their Characteristic flavor and aroma Cinnamon flavor The compound cinnamaldehyde is fat soluble, so when combined with fat in the filling as our chefs did with butter, the flavor will be distributed throughout the roll increasing its potency and producing a spicy flavor cinnamon All of our chefs use the same techniques to shape the dough.

You're going to go ahead and roll this puppy up. They rolled out the dough into a large rectangular shape. spread over the filling, roll the dough into a log and cut them into rolls after shaping them into their roles. Emily baked hers right away, while Gabrielle and Tracy let theirs ferment before baking. It will be worth the wait. Fermentation is the final fermentation step that allows the molded dough to rise before baking. During the final fermentation step, the yeast in the dough will continue to convert the sugars into carbon dioxide gas, fermenting the dough.bread before baking the enriched dough that Gabrielle and Tracy used requires a longer fermentation time than the lean dough that Emily used due to its high fat content and will benefit from the final fermentation step when the cinnamon rolls are put through the high oven heat, they grow rapidly in volume due to the increased fermentation rate.

This process is called oven springing once the rolls have released the crust. will begin to form and the rolls will fully take their shape. The cinnamon our chefs use contains a high content of volatile oils, this means that as the cinnamon bakes, the flavor compounds vaporize, become airborne and fill your cook with a delicious aroma that all our chefs created. A glaze to cover the top of your baked muffins Emily made a thin glaze by combining butter, confectioners' sugar, vanilla and hot water because I know what I'm doing. Gabrielle also made a fine one, I sang with icing sugar, vanilla and cream.

Creasy topped the warm rolls with cinnamon sugar and then whipped up a sweet mascarpone glaze, it's a little sweeter. and a little creamier than our traditional cream cheese, the frosting set our chefs made adds sweetness and flavor to the muffins, but also helps put moisture back into the dough after baking - literally, the frosting loads up as mentioned , the sugar in the cinnamon swirl is hygroscopic or water. affectionate and will draw water out of the dough and increase the rate of flaking. All of the glazes made by our chefs will slow the rate of flaking by providing an additional source of hydration to the dough the next time you're in the mood for a sweet treat.

Incorporate some of these tips into your next batch of cinnamon rolls.