Did You Know You Can Make Your Own "Rhodes" dough?

Well you can! And it's easy!

I'm sure you have a decent bread or rolls dough recipe. If you don't, and you'd like a good one, I have a few I'd be willing to share. I love to make bread and have gotten decent at it. You might remember I had a little contest with myself to see if I could find the best roll recipe a couple of years ago.

Anyway, so here's all there is to it...

All bread dough recipes follow a certain pattern. Mix yeast with sugar and water and dissolve - mix that with all the other ingredients, add flour and knead. After the kneading comes the first rising. Go ahead and "rise" your dough.

Something I do that cuts the rising time in half is to preheat my oven to 170 degrees while I'm making the dough. I leave the dough in my mixing bowl, cover it with a damp towel and place it into the very warm oven. I turn off the oven now. Place about 5 cups of boiling water in a metal bowl into the oven next to the bowl of dough and close the door. Between the heat and humidity, your dough will rise in about 15 minutes - guaranteed!

So when your dough has risen to twice its size, remove it from the oven. Spray a large cookie sheet or pan with non-stick spray and form your dough into small balls - about the size of a ball of cookie dough, perhaps 2". Make sure no dough balls are touching each other.

Immediately place the sheet of dough balls in the freezer and flash freeze them, which just means let them quickly freeze as-is. It will take several hours. Remove them, and throw them all into a gallon sized zippie bag. Label the bag with the following information:

1) defrost by laying them however you want the rolls to bake (i.e. in muffin tins, close together in a pan, or individual rolls) covered loosely with a piece of saran wrap that you've sprayed with non-stick

2) let rise in a warm place until double in size

3) include the baking time and temp from your dough recipe

That's it! Happy freezer dough!

p.s. this also works great for cookies too! Pre-form and freeze for easy cookies later!