Pistachio Dinner Rolls
I have become even more of a bread snob than I used to be.
The recipe
Yield: 8 rolls
Time: about 3 hours
Ingredients
150 g (1 ¼ c) raw, unsalted pistachios, divided
250 g (2 c) bread flour
5 g (1 ¼ tsp) instant yeast
5 g (¾ tsp) salt
185 g (¾ c) water
Instructions
1. Put 60 g (½ c) of pistachios in a food processor and grind them finely until they look like coarse flour. If you grind them too much, they might turn into nut butter. Place the pistachios in a large bowl.
2. Put the remaining pistachios in the food processor and pulse a few times until they have been chopped into large pieces. Place half of them in the bowl with the ground nuts and set the other half aside for use later.
3. Measure out the flour into the bowl with the pistachios and mix. Add the yeast to one side of the bowl and the salt to the other. Add the water and mix to combine.
4. Once the dough has picked up all the dry floury bits, turn it out onto your counter, dusting with flour if necessary, and knead for about 10 minutes. The dough should start out sticky and become smoother as you work with it, though it still stuck to my hands when I was done kneading it.
5. Place the dough in a clean bowl greased with a small amount of oil on the bottom and cover it with plastic wrap. Leave it in a warm place (between 75° and 78°F is ideal) to rise for about an hour, or until it’s puffy and has about doubled in size.
6. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper, fill a small bowl with water, and fill another small bowl with the remaining chopped pistachios.
7. Once the dough has risen, turn it out onto a small section of very lightly floured counter. Roll it out into a log about 12 inches long.
8. Divide the log into 8 pieces with a bench scraper or by pinching the dough off with your fingers. Shape the rolls by cupping each piece of dough in your hand, making a cage with your palm and fingers, and then rolling it in small circles on an unfloured section of your counter until it forms a ball shape with a tight skin. This video from King Arthur Flour is a great demonstration of this technique!
9. Dip your fingers in the water, wet the top and sides of one of the rolls, and then roll it around in the chopped pistachios to coat the top and sides. The bottom should be free of nuts. Place it on the baking sheet and repeat with the rest of the rolls. Cover them with some plastic bags (make sure they don’t touch the surface of the rolls) or drape an oiled piece of plastic wrap on top of them. Let them rise in a warm place for about an hour or until they look almost doubled in size.
10. While the rolls are rising, preheat your oven to 425°F. When the rolls are ready, bake them until they’re a golden brown on top and bottom and sound hollow when you tap the bottoms, about 15 minutes. Place them on a wire rack to finish cooling.
Notes and tips
I recommend using weight measures instead of volume measures for bread. It’s more precise, which ensures you have the right ratio of flour to water.
You can sub the raw pistachios for roasted ones, but your rolls will have a milder pistachio flavor and look more yellow or brown than green.
You don’t need much flour at all on your counter when you turn your dough out to shape it. The lightest dusting will be enough to keep it from sticking badly. And you actually want sticky dough for the shaping process! If your dough sticks to itself, it makes forming rolls much easier.
Don’t worry if your rolls are not doubled after each rise. The amount of ground pistachios in the dough inhibits rising a bit, so just make sure they look significantly bigger and noticeably puffy before baking them. This also means they’ll look like little domes instead of balls after baking in the oven, which I think is pretty cute!
Eat the rolls the day you bake them for the best experience. Homemade bread goes stale quickly even sealed in a plastic bag, so I recommend freezing them if you won’t eat them all on the day you bake them. They will reheat well from frozen in a 400°F oven.
The story
Ever since just before the pandemic (February 2020, before lockdown), I started baking my own bread (yes, I jumped on the sourdough train after quarantine started, and yes, I did go around to multiple grocery stores looking for bread flour each week) and I turned my husband and me both into bread snobs. After months of eating focaccia, challah, dinner rolls, crusty sourdough, and some failed ciabatta that I’d baked fresh in our own oven, we just could not go back to white sandwich bread. If we do need to buy bread, we get it from the bakery at our grocery store.
But we went to Switzerland this spring, and in the German-speaking part of the country, the breads were wonderful. They weren’t what I’m used to in the US, where different flavors come from dried fruits, cheeses, or herbs in the dough, or like the rich cinnamon rolls or brioche that get their flavor from extra ingredients like eggs and butter. Instead, the Swiss use nuts, seeds, or different kinds of flours in their breads, like einkorn, spelt, and whole wheats, and most of their loaves and rolls are savory. These are not the kind of wheat breads that seem like a worse, drier version of a white loaf; instead they celebrate grains and made them an important flavor and texture. For lunch one day we picked up a few rolls from the bakery in a grocery store and tried a pistachio one, coated in nuts and bright green in the middle. It was fantastic. I couldn’t find a recipe for pistachio bread online (my husband even searched in German), so I had to reproduce them myself.
And you have my husband to thank for the generous coating of pistachios on the outside of the rolls; he insisted that they needed the texture and crunch, and he was right.
Spread the love
If you like this recipe, please recommend Confessions of a Cake Snob to someone you know! Also feel free to share this newsletter with a friend, comment on the website, or bake it and let me know how it went for you! Email me with comments, things you’d like to see, and suggestions at confessionsofacakesnob@substack.com. I’m excited to hear from you!