One of my favorite parts about breads - especially homemade bread - is the crispy crust that forms in the oven, but a crispy-crust bread isn’t always ideal for all applications. Sandwiches and hamburgers, for instance, usually do better with something a little softer. I love my standard hamburger bun recipes, but lately, I’ve been on a bit of a mission to come up with a new recipe for soft sandwich rolls that keep well and don’t involve a ton of fat (since, if I wanted my sandwich on challah or brioche, I could always just go with that to begin with).

I decided to experiment with yogurt in my bread because it often contributes a nice tenderness to baked goods. It didn’t take long for me to realize that yogurt was a very good idea. The rolls turned out to be soft and moist on the inside, with a soft crust - a classic sandwich roll-type crust that is easy to bite into and doesn’t shatter into a million crumbs with each bite. The crumb of the bread is open enough to soak up juice from, say, a nice piece of hot roast beef, but is sturdy enough to hold your average cold sandwich - with mayo and mustard - for hours without getting soggy. They have a very mild, slightly sweet flavor that will go with any filling you might come up with.

I feel that I should also note that there is no dairy in these rolls other than the yogurt, and this makes them a great choice if you (or the person you’re baking for) are lactose intolerant. The bacteria used to turn milk to yogurt feed off lactose, so it shouldn’t upset any stomachs, while still giving you the soft texture and nice flavor of your average made-with-butter-and-milk soft sandwich roll.

The amount of flour you need will depend completely on how thick your yogurt is, so don’t worry if you don’t use the exact amount I’ve specified below. I used my go-to yogurt of choice: a thick, nonfat, Greek-style yogurt. It is about 50% thicker thick than your average plain yogurt and has a nice tang to it. The tanginess doesn’t really translate straight to the rolls, much like using buttermilk in a bread or cake doesn’t leave you with the sharp tang of buttermilk - however, both add tenderness to the finished products.

The rolls can be cut in half to make dinner rolls, too. You will probably have to cut the baking time down by 5 minutes if you chose to go this route. Fortunately color is a reliable indicator of doneness for these, so just take a peek in the oven every now and again and you should be fine. The rolls will keep for a couple of days when stored in an airtight container, so if you bake a batch on Sunday, they should still be just fine for sandwiches on Tuesday or Wednesday. I can’t guarantee they’ll last that long, since they’re also excellent with butter and jam and make a nice addition to breakfast, as well.

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Not every bread makes a really good sandwich, even though just about any bread can be used to put together a sandwich. A really good sandwich bread, in my opinion, needs several things. It needs to be solid enough to hold together any combination of standard sandwich ingredients without letting them soak into or through the bread, so I don’t want to see very large holes or an overly porous crumb. It needs to be relatively soft and moist, both so that you don’t need to take a swig of water after every bite just to get the bread down and so that you can bite into the sandwich with ease. And, finally, it needs to be flavorful.

This particular loaf of Oat Bran and Flaxseed Bread turned out to be one of the best sandwich breads I’ve made in recent memory.

From the name alone, the bread sounds very healthy - and it is - but it still meets all the criteria I listed above and doesn’t taste like “health food” (to use the term prejoratively here) in any way. The bran adds fiber and a pleasantly sweet oaty taste to the bread, while the flaxseed adds in protein and a bit of texture. Neither ingredient interfered with the soft and tight crumb of the bread, which I was able to achieve by using all purpose flour as the bread’s base.

This bread could probably be baked in a loaf pan if you really want a standard size to your slices, but I opted to go with a round loaf. I like the look and don’t have any problem with my sandwich slices not being identical. I should mention that because of the nice crumb this bread has, it is very easy to slice it to different thicknesses. I used thinner slices for sandwiches and thicker ones for toast. The bread will keep fresh for a couple of days if you store it in an airtight container and can be refreshed in the oven if you want to crisp up the crust again.

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Cream cheese appears with regularity in yeasted breads and pastries as a filling, paired with sugar, fruits or other sweet things. Less frequently, I’ve seen cream cheese used in savory pastries, paried with prosciutto, sundried tomatoes or with herbs. This bread was created when I decided to try using cream cheese as one of the main components of a bread, rather than as a filling of some kind.

I softened my cream cheese to room temperature and then incorporated it into a fairly standard white bread type of recipe. Since cream cheese has a relatively high fat content, I didn’t add in any butter, but I did add some dried dill to the bread to give it a nice herby flavor. Everything came together smoothly and the resulting dough was beautiful to work with - not too sticky and very elastic. I baked it in a loaf pan and couldn’t wait to slice into it as soon as I could smell the aroma of fresh-baked bread wafting from the oven.

In the end, I was really pleased with how the bread turned out. The loaf rose up beautifully and took on a lovely golden color on the top crust. The crumb was fairly tight and very, very soft. You couldn’t really taste the cream cheese at all in the finished loaf and I suspect that you would never guess what it was that made the interior so moist and tender without being told. The cream cheese acted almost like butter in its role as a tenderizer, but since the bread had no butter flavor, you were left with the sweet taste of white bread and a lovely dill overtone.

This bread made great sandwiches, especially when it was toasted. Chicken and turkey were both excellent, and I’m sure that pork would suit the bread fine, too. I used dried dill as I find it to be the most convenient to work with, but you can use fresh or experiment with other herbs instead if you prefer.

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I’m a huge soft pretzel fan. Whether they’re homemade or store-bought (preferably from a store or market that specializes, to some degree, in pretzel production), I’m usually happy to munch on a salted pretzel with a bit of mustard. But pretzels certainly come on more forms than soft, and the crunchy variety certainly has its uses, especially where dips are concerned. I had never had too much success in turning out a homemade breadstick-like pretzel in the past, but after I caught sight of a lovely post on this very subject, I decided to try my hand at pretzel sticks again.

It’s a good thing that I did, too, because these were quite addictive! The finished sticks were very crisp, although not hard all the way through in the way that store-bought pretzel sticks are, and were pretty easy to make. The dough did not need a long rise and, once shaped, the pretzels only needed a quick dip in a hot baking soda-water bath before baking. The water adds a familiar pretzel taste to the sticks, helps to create a chewy crust (important in soft pretzels, somewhat less so in this case) and makes it very easy to adhere salt and other toppings to the sticks.

For toppings, I used a very coarse salt on some and grated Parmesan cheese on others. The cheese versions had a lot more flavor and made for a more interesting breadstick. That said, I liked the plain salt version. Be creative when it comes to the toppings. Try cheese, but feel free to use sesame seeds, poppy seeds or just plain salt and pepper to finish yours. Because the toppings will have no problem sticking to the wet dough, be careful about how much salt you use as a “dip” if you opt for plain salted pretzel sticks; I had a few that were overly salty, even for me.

The key to this recipe is shaping the pretzels properly. The sticks can be any length but they all need to be quite thin to work out. I would recommend between 1/4 and 1/2 inch thick, with a preference towards narrower. The thinner pretzels will be crisper, while the thicker ones will be crisp with a slightly soft center. If you find it difficult to achieve such a narrow rope when you first start working with the dough, don’t worry. As you handle it, the gluten (protein) in the dough toughens up and makes the ropes difficult to stretch. Simply let the dough rest for a few minutes while you’re working it, rolling a few new ropes and going back to further stretch the already formed ones after about 5 minutes. Since you’ll need to bake the pretzels in batches unless you have a really massive oven, you can always adjust the pretzels in later batches to be a little thicker or thinner, as you prefer.
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Slathered in butter, dipped in gravy, soaking up sauce - dinner rolls can certainly play a very important roll in an evening meal. This isn’t to say that they’re required, but there is a reason that so many restaurants will put out a basket of dinner rolls for every table that comes in.

The inspiration for these dinner rolls came from Susan at Farmgirl Fare, who mentioned to me that she was having difficulty finding a good recipe for whole wheat dinner rolls online. This isn’t to say that there aren’t a lot out there - the internet is a huge place, after all - but sometimes when there are so many to choose from it can be tricky to nail a good one in one shot. So, I decided to whip up a batch as a variation on another whole wheat recipe that I really like, Whole Wheat Hamburger Buns.

These rolls use white whole wheat flour instead of regular whole wheat flour and are slightly richer than the burger bun recipe due to the addition of a little buttermilk and melted butter. I added some bread flour to my sponge (the flour/yeast mixture that is the starter for the rolls) instead of starting out with the whole wheat flour because I wanted the extra gluten of the bread flour to give the rolls some lightness and elasticity; dinner rolls shouldn’t be dense and I wanted to prevent that while keeping them mostly whole grain.

The resulting rolls were delicious! The recipe comes together very easily, even though there are several (short) rising stages to wait through. They had a nice nutty whole wheat flavor without a dense or heavy feel, and a hint of butteriness really gave them the feel of a dinner roll. I baked them in a 9-inch round cake pan, so the rolls stuck together into one gorgeous mass of bread, which pulled apart beautifully to reveal the fluffy crumb. I served them with chili and they were perfect for soaking up the sauce, but they also went well with butter and jam and the leftovers toasted beautifully for breakfast. This recipe will also work with regular whole wheat flour, although you might need to add a bit less than the amount called for here, as whole wheat flour tends to absorb a bit more moisture than white whole wheat or regular all purpose flour. The rolls will also not be quite as light, but should still be on the fluffy side for a whole wheat roll.

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 Panettone is a sweet yeast bread that originated in Milan, Italy. Served most often at Christmas, though it is also baked for other occasions, the tender bread is baked as a tall round (either a cylinder or an octagon) and filled with things like raisins, candied citrus and nuts. Sometimes the bread is spiked with a bit of rum or another liquour, or else the fruits might be soaked in it before being added to the bread. It is good eaten plain, but if you want to get fancy it can be made into a decadent version of french toast or bread pudding.

Really rich doughs, heavy in butter and eggs, are often sticky and require more rising time than other yeast breads, but it is no more difficult to make panettone than other yeast breads. The only thing you may actually need - other than a bit of practice - is a special mold to shape your loaf in.

But I don’t need a special pan that is used for baking only one loaf of bread and, even though I like working with yeast bread doughs, I certainly don’t want to spend more time in the kitchen around the holidays than with my friends and family. So, I adapted a recipe for a bundt-pan babka into a no-knead, quick rising Bundt Panettone.

The panettone comes out in a ring, which is somewhat untraditional, but tastes delicious. It is quite sweet and very, very tender - nearly cake-like - in texture. It can be toasted, but pairs perfectly with coffee on its own. I opted to only use raisins because I am not a fan of candied fruits in bread, but I had some large pearl sugar (substantially larger than even coarse organic sugar and available in Swedish and specialty baking stores) that I stirred into the dough before baking. After being baked, the bread is lightly soaked in a sugar-rum syrup to make it extra-moist and give it a final flavor boost.

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