Dinner rolls

The wet dough aged overnight, this went a little longer, okay a lot longer. Twelve hours is a good target. 

The yeast will go as far as it can go and then slow down then stop even though its environment is favorable. It will attempt to consume its environment but languishing this way affords the yeast one way of reproducing, by budding, growing like a tree except in segments. But once the the dough is turned out onto a work surface and stretched then the yeast are redistributed and they suddenly find themselves in propinquity with a corresponding type and are afforded their sexy type of reproducing, that is, they can suddenly turn on their bad diploid selves from their languishing depleting haploid activities. 

But it looks like such a wet gooey mess, doesn't it?

In Mexico they make the best dinner rolls and I always marveled at their mastery, and now I have the secret.

That is to say I've internalized their strange ninja dinner rolls ways.

This is where you control the timing if you want to do that, say, narrow it down so that your guests are awestruck with your mad dinner roll abilities by presenting excellent hot rolls directly from the oven at dinner time.

You decide when to shape them. There's no pressure for them to be puffy and presentable as these appear to be here, they can be loose and wet and floppy when they are inserted into the oven, so proofing them a second time is not so critical as it seems. However they cannot overproof at this point, so error on the side of short proofing them. And if your guests call and say they'll be late by an hour then your plan is dashed for on-demand presentation, or tell your guests, "Well, just forget it then!"

There was about an hour resting in the proofing box after being formed but it could have been as short as 20 minutes. There is not much difference between pre and post proofing. 20 minutes would not allow time for the yeast to do much of its diploid activity but it really doesn't matter. The air holes are already present and folded in the loose floppy wet dough balls. Intense heat will expand them once it reaches them, but the surface must be kept wet in intense heat for the network of pockets inside it to stretch.  If proofing in the box helps develop the air pockets a little before that then great, but this works well with short or long second proofing.  Just so you know, this is where you control timing again if that's important to you. 

The floppy wet dough balls are inserted into the torture chamber and steamed in there for  the first 10 minutes allowing heat to get to the center and expand the air inside the air bubbles and air pockets. The skin must stretch to accommodate all that internal expansion. It's like a balloon holding a thousand tiny organic balloons inflated with heat. To get that heat to the center fast it must be high heat. For the surface to stretch like a balloon it must be kept moist.

These are the tricks of the trade:

1) insanely slow proof 12 hours best, this is 16 hours

2) wet sticky dough

3) no punching. stretching and folding instead.

4) high heat

5) kept moist with heavy misting for expansion then stopped to crisp the  crust.