Real Food, Real Bread: My Homestead Sourdough Rolls

Everything in life is harder when you injure your dominant hand. I never realized how aggressively I rely on my right thumb until I went full cartoon character and wiped out on the ice. Ah yes, the glamorous life of a snowshoe guide: hike, Jeep, snowshoe, fall on my ass, repeat. Bake Sourdough Rolls and shove them at my face until I feel better.

If You’re Cold, Tired, and Fed up with your Hippie Neighbors, Make These Damn Sourdough Rolls

Turns out, stretching and folding dough with only nine functional fingers is not the relaxing bread therapy Pinterest promised. Honestly, everything is harder with nine fingers. Typing hurts. Holding a mug hurts. Even pretending I’m fine hurts. Thank God I didn’t injure my favorite finger—I need that one for mountain driving during ski season, especially on Saturday mornings when I’m navigating past “Freedom Corner,” where our local residents are standing around freezing in their kaftans, waving their bongs in the air, while the rest of us responsible adults are just trying to Back The Blue, going to work and keep the lights on. Yes, I’m judgmental. I’m also in pain and working ten-hour days. Both things can be true.

And honestly, if Mother Nature is going to withhold the winter wonderland I so desperately crave, the least she can do is give me a rainy day, a warm kitchen, and my collection of extremely lazy Norwegian Forest Cats—who may or may not be from Norway and may very well be from the local cat rescue here in the San Bernardino Mountains. Either way, these long-haired freeloaders know how to commit to a proper rainy-day lifestyle.

Which brings us to dinner.

Sourdough Rolls That Deserve a Standing Ovation (Even in Snow Boots)

When the weather is gloomy, your hand is busted, and your cats are actively refusing to contribute to society, you make sourdough rolls. Because carbs may not solve your problems, but warm bread absolutely softens them.

This sourdough dough is wildly versatile. You can turn it into pizza. You can bake it into focaccia. But when what you really need is comfort food that doesn’t require surgical precision or ten working fingers, these easy sourdough rolls are the move. They’re soft inside, golden outside, and forgiving enough that even a snowshoe guide with a busted thumb can pull them off.

I love serving these on a freezing cold winter night alongside my favorite Clam Chowder.

Snowed In & Baking: My Foolproof Sourdough Rolls Recipe

150 grams sourdough discard starter

1 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons olive oil

600 grams of bread flour

375 grams of water

1 teaspoon rice flour

1 egg

In your mixing bowl, add your room-temperature warm water to your starter discard. Add the honey. Set aside for a few minutes. Mix in the 2 teaspoons of olive oil, bread flour and salt. Mix just a bit until you have a shaggy dough and set it aside. Let it sit, well covered for thirty minutes. After thirty minutes, pull your dough together, maybe twenty times, doing coil folds until it comes together just a bit and has a shine to it. You can use extra flour or water on your hands to keep the dough from sticking to them or the bowl. Set your dough aside for thirty more minutes.

After thirty minutes, you will want to do six sets of stretch and folds, every fifteen minutes. Check out this video for what the hell a stretch and fold may be. After your sixth set of stretch and folds, leave your dough on the counter, well covered, overnight or for twelve hours to ferment.

After twelve hours, you are ready to pull your dough back together into a ball and cold ferment it for 5-12 hours. The longer you cold ferment the better the sourdough flavor will build. Use rice flour to coat the outside of your dough so it does not stick. Set your dough in a bowl with a clean towel coated with rice flour and set in the fridge, well-covered, to cold ferment.

When you are ready to bake your sourdough rolls, preheat your oven to 400. Cut your dough in thirds. I like to freeze two of those thirds in ziplock bags. With the third one, I cut it up into 6 pieces. Roll them into balls and let them rise for 2 hours. When you are ready to bake the rolls, brush them with the egg wash and bake them for 20 minutes.