Dough Day + Rhubarb!

I recently saw on a Facebook discussion group that a local restaurant is serving rhubarb caramel rolls. That got the wheels turning. 🙂 I read through a few recipe suggestions about how to make the rhubarb sauce and how to integrate it into a caramel roll recipe and then commenced winging it as I usually do. Pinterest is my best friend on days like this.

I have kind of a like/hate relationship with rhubarb. For most of my life I hated it and have now gotten to the point where I like it – if it’s tempered with strawberries, or at least strawberry flavor. In my opinion, it’s just too tart to be palatable unless it’s in a recipe loaded with sugar, which I’m also not fond of in large quantities. In the case of this recipe, the tartness of the rhubarb is mellowed by the caramel, and I make the rhubarb sauce with strawberry jello – a win win for me. These rolls still have a tartness to them, so I pointed out a few places where more sugar can be added.

Let’s start with the sauce:

• 6 cups chopped rhubarb
• 2 Tbs. water
• 1/4 cup honey
• 1 box strawberry jello

Cook the rhubarb, water, and honey until the rhubarb is thoroughly cooked, about 10 minutes, stirring often. Stir in the packet of jello mix and cook about 5 more minutes.

Note: this makes a pretty tart sauce, even considering that Jello also has a lot of sugar. Feel free to add more sugar or honey if you like it sweeter. Some recipes use as much as a cup of sugar. What you don’t use for the rolls is excellent on ice cream or even spread on toast. It will thicken more as it cools.

For the caramel rolls, I used the dough recipe for North Dakota Caramel Rolls. You can find it here

• 1 pkg rapid rise active dry yeast (I buy it in bulk, so I used a Tbs.)
• 1/2 cup warm water
• 1/2 cup shortening (I never have shortening in my house, so I subbed melted butter)
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 2 cups buttermilk
• 6 cups bread flour (I used AP)
• 2 tsp salt
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp baking soda

Dissolve the yeast in the warm water and let sit for about 10 minutes until foamy. Mix the dry ingredients in a separate bowl. Add the sugar, melted butter, and buttermilk to the yeast and water. Mix in half of the flour mixture thoroughly, then add the rest a cup or so at a time. Add more flour as needed until it makes a soft, but not sticky, dough. You can do the mixing by hand or using a stand mixer with dough hooks. Knead for 5-10 minutes by hand or with the mixer. Let the dough rest while you make the caramel sauce.

My normal caramel sauce is just a 3:2 ratio of brown sugar to cream mixed in the bottom of the pan. This time I had a quart of whey caramel in the fridge so I used it. What is whey caramel you ask? It is the delicious result of cooking down the whey that drains from making homemade Greek yogurt or cottage cheese and adding sugar and butter. Here is the recipe. It’s also a great ice cream topping.

I warmed the caramel a little to make it more pourable (I think I just made up that word), and mixed it in the bottom of a large (12 1/2 x 16 1/2 in.) roasting pan with two heaping cups of the rhubarb sauce.

Bake at 375 for 35 minutes. Remove from the oven and carefully flip over onto a cookie sheet, scraping out all the caramel sauce and spreading on top of the rolls.

While the rolls were rising I decided to use the time productively and bake bread as well. Thanks to the pandemic, I could not find flour or yeast in stores in Arizona, even up until mid-May, unless I got up at the crack of dawn, waited in line, and did this repeatedly, hoping to get lucky (my, how the meaning of that phrase has changed!). I decided to avoid that hassle and elevated my grandma street cred by using Amazon Prime to purchase a 50 lb. bag of flour and a pound of yeast. I froze the flour in one gallon ziplock bags and brought a few of them back to ND with me, along with a pint jar of yeast. I still had a jar of yeast in the refrigerator from last summer that had expired a couple of months ago. I didn’t want to chance making bread with it, so I dissolved some of that in a bowl of water and did another bowl with my new stuff to compare. They both got nice and bubbly, so I figured I may as well bake something with the extra batch.

I used this recipe from Plated Cravings, and again, where it calls for 2 1/4 tsp yeast, which is a packet, I uses a Tbs. It turned out fabulous! It makes two loaves, one to devour right away with homemade chokecherry jelly and one to share or freeze. With no preservatives, this bread does not stay fresh long. If you freeze it, wrap it tightly with Saran Wrap and then put it in a ziplock freezer bag. When you thaw and warm it slightly, it will be just as good as freshly baked.