it may be easier to start with your flour, and then add your fats and eggs and then add liquid at the end to just get it moistened. feel it and see what it needs, and make the adjustment more liquid or flour for drier. you may screw up, or get it perfect. just keep trying and you'll get there. cooking/ baking (to a point) is intuitive and not an exact science.

good luck and happy baking,

ry

The easiest solution would be to hold off with the 1/2 cup of water toward the end of mixing. You might not even need/knead it.

Adding more flour than the recipe can very easily slow down rising times.

Mini O

hi im im a qualified baker with over 20 years experience in the trade

a lot can vary  from recipes if you can send me the method that u uused to make this im sure i can help ie

1st step to last

email to raykat43@bigpond.com

p.s look forward to helping you out

Thanks for all the comments. I love those spreadsheets, dolf. What exactly is the hydration value?

Here are the directions for the recipe that I used:

Place milk in a small saucepan and bring to a simmer. Remove from the heat, stir in the butter and sugar and let cool. Dissolve yeast in warm water and let sit until foamy. Combine milk mixture, eggs, yeast, salt, and 1/2 of the flour in a mixer with the dough attachment and mix until smooth. Add the remaining flour, 1/2 cup at a time, and stir until a smooth ball forms. At this point, I still did not have the smooth ball and had to continue adding flour, almost another cup, until a dough ball somewhat formed.

Remove from the bowl and knead by hand on a floured surface for about 5 minutes. Place in greased bowl, cover, and let rise in a warm place until doubled in bulk, about 60 to 70 minutes. On a floured surface, punch down the dough and shape into desired shapes. Place on a parchment paper-lined baking sheet. Cover again and let rise until doubled, about 30 to 40 minutes.

Preheat the oven 350 degrees F.

Bake for about 20 minutes or until golden brown. Remove from the oven and brush with melted butter before serving.

A few years back a twit from England terrorized a newsgroup with his inability to understand what a cup was.  His repeated rant was, "what's a sodding cup?"

He wouldn't stop (figuratively speaking) screaming long enough to understand that, yes Virginia, there is such a thing as a standardized cup.

However, there are still problems with cups. In one of the UseNet baking newsgroups, there was a challenge - if you have a set of scales, weigh a few cups of flour and post the weights.

The range was from less than 100 to more than 200 grams. The less than 100 gram sorts sifted their flour more than once, spooned it into the cup, and then scraped off the excess with a straight edge. The more than 200 set scooped the flour out of the flour sack with the cup - and did it rather viciously. Worse, the scoopers had as much as a 25% cup to cup variation.

If you sift the flour once, spoon it into the cup, and then scrape off the excess, you'll get close to 120 grams every time.

All of which tells us that a cup is a rather variable measure. Flour, like other granulated solids such as sugar and salt, can be compressed. So, when someone says, "Use 8 cups of flour" what DO they mean?

Bobby Flay admits that chefs are lousy bakers. And I like his pie fillings better than his pie crusts. Which is to take nothing away from the Iron Chef, he is a great chef.

But, did you see him make the rolls? If so, how did he measure the cups? There could be a clue there. Is he a scooper? A sifter? Did someone give him the flour so you never saw it measured?

Some more baking relevant suggestions.

I suggest beginners start by mixing by hand so they'll know what dough should feel like, and what it feels like as it develops.

There's no one "correct" feeling for dough. How wet, or dry, the dough should be depends on what you are making. KitchenAid's suggestion to add flour until the dough ball comes together is a hint for using the KitchenAid mixer effectively, not a hint on how to make good bread. While the KitchenAid mixers are not as limited as to the dough hydration they can handle as a bread machine, they ARE limited. If the dough is "too wet" for the machine, it will crawl up the dough hook and make a mess. Even if the dough should be that wet to make a focaccia or other bread that uses wet dough.

Because of the practical limitations of cups, I am suspicious of recipes that say, "8 cups of flour." I prefer recipes that say, "6 to 12 cups of flour" and tell you how the dough should feel. When I teach classes, I suggest that the students start at the lower end of the range and add flour slowly after that. If the recipe has a fixed amount of flour, I suggest they start with 1/2 to 2/3 of that amount and then add more flour slowly. I have them do this by hand, or with a wooden spoon, until the dough is too stiff to stir by hand. At that time, it's time to start kneading.

When I add flour to such a recipe, I like to pretend I am Ebeneezer Scrooge from "A Christmas Carol" and that flour costs as much as Saffron ("The Most Expensive Spice In The World! (tm)" I add a tablespoon at a time.

Most doughs work better when they are a bit too wet than when they are a bit too dry, so don't over add flour.

Some people freak out when the dough is sticky, but THE number one beginners error is adding too much flour. It's OK if the dough is a bit sticky. It's just flour, water, salt and yeast. It's not going to dissolve your flesh. You can wash it off your hands, off your work surface , off the floors, off the walls, off your clothes or whatever.

The goal isn't to have a dough that is not-sticky. The goal is to have a tacky dough that would rather stick to itself than you, the work surface, or whatever.

Even my bagel doughs are somewhat tacky, and they are very dry doughs.

I hate to blow my own horn (not that it stops me very often), but I have a tutorial for beginning bakers on my web site at http://www.sourdoughhome.com/bakingintro.html It has gotten lots of positive feedback, so I think it really, really works,

Also, on the kneading by hand front, I have some videos of how to knead at http://www.sourdoughhome.com/kneadingconverting.html that have gotten good feedback also. My approach is very effective, but low impact. People with carpal tunnel issues or arthiritis who have told me they couldn't knead bread were amazed that they could in fact knead bread using my approach.

While a good mixer is a great tool, I think that it often gets in the way of learning to bake. And with a small batch of bread, a mixer really isn't a time saver.  Once you know how to bake, then the mixer can be a great boon.

Hope that helps,

Mike

    I've looked up several recipes for Parker House Rolls and this one contains the most eggs. I think "parker House" is in reference to a folded light buttered roll served at OMni Parker House in Boston.. Bobby Flay has 2 recipes on internet one contains only 1 egg, 2 sticks of softened buttered and 2 cups water, no milk. Other ingredients are almost the same. This recipe you've tried seems brioche like which is pretty sticky. Other hydrationsin recipes I've seen come out to about 66%. This also includes hydration from the butter which I don't know if dolfs has included that in his spreadsheet. If you are a new baker than you probably don't have to be to concerned about hydrations and pctgs., though they are good to know. Measuring accurately with cups or scales is important as are the quality and types of ingredients you use. I don't really think of Bobby Flay as a baker, though he probably does have his own bakers and his recipes may just be scaled down versions of theirs. A lot could go wrong in that process alone.

• From "The Bread Bible" comes a recipe using a sponge. It uses no eggs and has a hyfration of 66%.
• From the CIA's "Baking and Pastry" the formula for "Soft Roll Dough" contains 10% eggs (half of Flay's posted recipe).
• From "Beard on Bread" comes a formula with 67.15% hydration, 1 egg (5.5%).
• From Flay's "other" recipe we find a 55% hydration dough, with just one egg in it. There is also a note that mentions the recipe is untested by the FoodTV kitchen. It does say, however, that this recipe was provided by the Omni Parker House itself.

I know virtually nothing about baking, and just from this thread I have learned a great deal. Mike, your video's are great. I went and made some bread yesterday using my hands to knead it out. It was fun and I think I'll 'stick' to that for awhile until I know what I'm doing.