Spicy Cheesy Korean Rolls (Gochujang Rolls)
Confession: These rolls are even less authentically Korean than the pork belly ones from last time.
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The recipe
Yield: 12 rolls
Time: 3 hours
Ingredients
Tangzhong:
½ c (113 g) milk
3 tbsp (24 g) bread flour
Dough:
½ c (113 g) cold milk, right from the fridge
2 ½ c (300 g) bread flour
4 tbsp (57 g) salted butter, room temperature
2 tbsp (25 g) sugar
1 egg
1 tsp (6 g) salt
2 tsp (8 g) instant yeast
Filling:
1 ½–2 ½ tbsp (38–63 g) gochujang
water
4 oz (113 g) Asiago or similar cheese
Instructions
1. Whisk together the milk and flour for the tangzhong. Cook the mixture in a small pot over medium heat until it becomes a thick paste, about 5 minutes.
2. Place the warm tangzhong in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the dough hook attachment. Next, add the cold milk, then the bread flour, butter, sugar, and egg. Add the salt one side of the bowl and the yeast to the other.
3. Mix on low, scraping down the sides of the bowl, until combined and no floury bits remain.
4. Mix on medium-high speed for about 10 minutes. Your dough should be soft and shiny and very stretchy.
5. Put the dough in a bowl, cover it, and leave to rise until noticeably bigger in size but not necessarily doubled, about 1 hour.
6. Mix the gochujang with just enough water (a teaspoon or two) so that it will spread easily with a pastry brush. Use the lesser amount for less spicy rolls. Grate the cheese, and reserve ⅓ cup of it for topping the rolls before baking.
7. When the dough has risen, gently use your fist to punch it down, then turn it out onto a very lightly floured counter. Flour a rolling pin to keep it from sticking and roll the dough out into a rectangle about 8 inches tall and 15 inches wide.
8. Brush the gochujang onto the dough, all the way to the edges, but leave a small ½ inch section on the bottom of the rectangle bare.
9. Evenly distribute the cheese over the dough, except for your reserved ⅓ cup.
10. From the top of the long edge of the rectangle, roll the dough down to the bottom long edge, forming a swirl. Using your finger, wet the bottom edge of the rectangle and roll the whole thing a few times to seal the bottom.
11. Using a knife, make shallow scores on your log of dough to help cut it into 12 even rolls. Use dental floss to actually cut the rolls for a cleaner edge. See this GIF on King Arthur’s website for a how-to.
12. Place the rolls on baking sheets and top with the remaining ⅓ cup cheese. Cover with plastic wrap or plastic bags to rise until the rolls slowly spring back halfway when you poke them with a finger, about an hour.
13. Preheat your oven to 375°F while the rolls are rising.
14. When your rolls are ready, bake them for 11–13 minutes, until they’re lightly brown on the tops.
15. Transfer the rolls to a wire cooling rack and once cool, store them in an airtight container in the fridge. To serve from refrigerated, toast on the gentlest setting on a toaster oven, or warm in a 350°F oven for 5 minutes.
Notes and tips
Tangzhong is simply a cooked mixture of flour and milk or water. It turns into a gel-like paste and makes breads extra soft and keeps them from going stale as quickly as usual.
The milk should be cold from the fridge to help cool off the tangzhong and keep it from killing your yeast, which is why the order of ingredients matters in this dough. The tangzhong will warm your final dough up enough to give it a boost when it rises, even if your kitchen is cold.
Gochujang is a Korean red pepper paste, and it’s quite spicy! Use the full amount for the best flavor, and use the smaller amount if you’re sensitive to spicy things.
To help your dough form a rectangle shape, pull the corners into a rough rectangle before rolling it out.
My rolls in the picture are a little overdone and darker than they should be. They should be a light golden brown.
The story
I tried to make these rolls just as authentic as the pork belly ones from last time, since I was developing both recipes simultaneously. My original vision was going to be a single recipe: Korean-inspired rolls two ways, one option filled with just ssamjang (a salty, slightly spicy paste) and one filled with just gochujang (a sweet and spicy red pepper paste used all the time in Korean cooking). However, during the process, the rolls differed enough from each other that I decided to make them two separate recipes.
I also ran into a disagreement with my tasters. They did not have the same vision for the rolls that I did. They felt like something was missing when I asked them to try the plain ssamjang and gochujang versions, and suggested adding meat to the ssamjang rolls and cheese to the gochujang ones. I thought the cheese idea was crazy, so I completely disregarded that suggestion, and instead I tried toning down the spiciness of the gochujang (another suggestion they made) by thinning it out with water, which didn’t work. The rolls tasted mostly like plain bread then.
However, after adding pork belly to the ssamjang rolls went really well, I began to reconsider the cheese idea. And when the fifth person independently told me that she thought the rolls would be better with cheese, I did something that I’ve never done before in recipe development. I trusted my tasters and overruled my gut, and I put Asiago in the rolls. It was one of the whitest things I’ve ever done.
And you know what? It was delicious.
To get your hands on ssamjang or gochujang, you might not have to go farther than your normal grocery store. More places are carrying it, especially gochujang, which has been appearing in a lot of fusion dishes lately. What you’re looking for is a small plastic tub, green for ssamjang and red for gochujang. If you can’t find them at your grocery store, Amazon sells them. They’re shelf-stable until you open them, and after that need to be kept in the fridge. After you pop open the lid, there’s a seal beneath. Only pull that off halfway, because it will keep the paste from drying out before you finish using it. The pastes will darken in color and thicken over time, but that is normal.
If you want to do some Korean cooking to use up your gochujang or ssamjang, check out Maangchi. Her wonderful recipes are available written out or as videos and they’re the ones my husband and I use whenever we cook Korean.
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