Fresh bread roll with cumin - Kaiserbrötchen

emperors breadroll with cumin one bread wooden background

Besides eating bread, we Germans also enjoy to other things, for example we love to eat – BREADROLLS. There are bread rolls with sunflower seeds, plain bread rolls, some are made with sourdough, some have a hard consistency, some have a soft consistency, there are flat bread rolls and fluffy ones, some bread rolls have walnuts added and some come with hazelnuts, there are sweet ones, savory ones, we got all different names for them, there is one regional specialty that is called soul “Seele”, we call them Schrippe, Semmel, Wecken or Broetchen, always depending where you live in Germany, we even invited chemists to help us created some by putting a glaze of base on them before we bake them. So we actually created a very special one that is called Laugenwecken - base based bread roll.
Some of you might now say – UNGH – why the hell you put chemical on your bread roll? Good question indeed, but funny that you should be so put off by this. Actually, another German specialty, using base as a glaze before it is baked, is the so called Bretzel. These special baked goods made it big in the US, but not before they gave it another name (Pretzel) and added things like mustard on it. But you can change its name, grow its shape but in the end it stays what it is - a German bread roll based recipe shaped like a BRETZEL.

Anyway, to not confuse you any further, today I really wanted to eat some cumin bread rolls. So, with the help of my bread maker, I made these bread rolls, based on the recipe for “Kaiserbrötchen” – emperors bread roll and added some cumin on top. The emperor’s bread roll is a very old recipe that owns its name from a tradition. When the emperor of German was celebrating his birthday, he distributed this bread to the folks to let them participate of the event as well.

Ingrediens:

• 7 g dried yeast
• 150 ml lukewarm water
• 150 ml lukewarm milk
• 500 g flour
• 80 g butter
• 2 teaspoonn salbt

Put everything in your bread machine and use the program to mix dough. It will take 1 hour 30 or so until everything is mixed nicely and the yeast was working the dough through. After the program is finished, let the dough rest for another 30 minutes.

Then you prepare a table with flour on top. You divided the dough in 8 similar portions. For every one of the portion in round bread roll shape and place it on a baking tray that you covered with baking paper before. After all bread rolls are on the tray,take a knife, wet the blade and cut a cross on the surface of the bread rolls, then sprinkle the Cumin on top of the bread rolls. After that sprinkle water on top of them, cover the tray and the breads with a towel and put it for half on an hour in a warm place where the yeast can work up the dough one more time.

In the meantime you prepare the oven and preheat it with 220 degrees Celsius. Then you sprinkle more water on the bread rolls that they are glistening wet and pop them on the medium tray in the oven. Add a cup of water to the oven. Now you bake them for 6 minutes and then you turn down the temperature to 180 degrees. After that you bake them for another 25 – 35 minutes until the surface is nice and gold brown

emperors breadroll with cumin on the tray

WARNING – when the bread rolls come out of the oven, the room will be full of mouthwatering smells.

1. Watch out before you bite in one of them, they are piping hot J. Enjoy them still warm with a bit of butter on top, you will feel like in paradise …
2. The smell is highly addictive and once you made those fresh bread rolls, you would want to make some every day just to have this fresh bakery smell in your apartment…