Buttery bread rolls

Xavier Barriga is the equivalent for Ferran Adria in Spain but in the bread making industry. He has baked bread for very important events and he has four very famous bakeries around Barcelona (to which, disappointingly, I’ve never gone to). He recently published a book called Pan (bread) and it obviously went straight to my never ending wish list of cookbooks on Amazon. The list isn’t public and I had never mentioned it to anybody so I was quite surprised when two family members got me the same book for Christmas. I guess they know me really well….Of course I immediately changed one of them for another Spanish lovely book from Ferran Adria that had recently been published as well (there is also an English version).

Xavier Barriga’s book is good but you can tell he doesn’t do much shopping for his own house. In practically all the recipes of the book he calls for a certain kind of flour (harina de panadería or bread flour) that you just can’t find in Spain. So I went crazy trying to understand what he meant. I went to quite a lot of shops and nobody had a clue what he was talking about, so I decided to go like in the White Loaves recipe from Dorie Greenspan and just use a similar type of flour.

I know when I buy an American book that I will have problems finding some ingredients, it’s completely normal. I just don’t understand how a Spanish baker doesn’t know the types of flour you can find in a normal store; he should at least mention possible substitutes.

Being kind of mad at him it took me a while to go and try one of the recipes but I finally went ahead and decided to bake “Panecillos de mantequilla tostada” (something like buttery bread rolls). Absolutely amazing right out of the oven, pretty good the next morning and eatable the second day (after toasting the bread).

You can find the Spanish recipe here and, above, the translated version for about 10 bread rolls:

Ingredients:

• 500 gr of bread flour
• 10 gr of salt
• 28 gr of water
• 15 gr of fresh yeast
• 30 gr of butter
• 15 gr of sugar
• 10 gr of powdered milk

Preparation:

1. Melt the butter until it has a golden color. Let cool.
2. Mix the dry ingredients first and add the butter, the water and finally the yeast. Divide in pieces of 80 grams and form balls.  Let them rise for about 35 minutes.
3. Make the bread rolls closing the pieces to the interior as if you folded a scarf and let the rise until they double the size.
4. Preheat the oven to 250ºC and put a bowl filled with water to create vapor. Introduce in the oven the pieces and bake at 200ºC for 16-18 minutes.