My bread machine cookbook includes recipes for two different refrigerator doughs, each with a set of recipes using the ready-made dough in the fridge into a variety of different snacks, meals, and breads. I had heard of this particular timesaving technique before but never really used it. This week, with even less energy to make breakfast and lunch than usual, I decided to give it a try.
- 3 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 and 1/2 cups oat bran
- 1 Tbsp yeast
- 2 tsp salt
- 1 and 1/2 Tbsp sugar
- 2 Tbsp coconut oil
- 1 and 1/2 cups plus 2 Tbsp water
Put in the bread machine on the DOUGH setting, but set a timer to go off after the bread has risen 25 minutes. Remove the dough. Transfer to reclosable plastic container coated with cooking spray. Cover tightly and refrigerate at least 6 hours.
My recipe says "up to two days" but I kept using it for about 4 days and it was fine. The dough is sticky and moist compared to, say, a pizza dough. It seemed the easiest way to handle it, at least when making small items like turnovers, was to press it into rounds with your fingers on a greased cookie sheet.
- Little burrito-shaped turnovers, open at the ends, stuffed with fresh chopped broccoli and cheddar, which we ate for lunch next to leftover minestrone soup. Verdict: yum.
- Soft pretzels, which I salted heavily and ate with mustard. Longtime readers know I am extremely picky about my soft pretzels. These weren't the best I had ever had, but eating them still hot from the oven was a definite plus.
- Pizzas for the kids' lunch. I didn't get to try the pizzas because they disappeared too fast.
- Little hot apple turnovers for breakfast, sprinkled with cinnamon sugar. These were roundly enjoyed, and something like this may replace cherry bran muffins as my get-up-and-go-morning breakfast. (I cooked the apple filling — apples, raisins, sugar, cinnamon, apple juice, corn starch — in ten minutes on the stovetop the night before, refrigerated it overnight and then reheated it before stuffing and baking the turnovers in the morning). They were kind of small so I supplemented the grownups' breakfast with some scrambled eggs, but the kids were content to eat the little turnovers. They were surprisingly un-messy, even eaten out of hand.
Every one of these things were unplanned, last-minute kind of things (except that I decided to do the turnovers the night before, but it was kind of the last minute before bed, which counts in my book). The dough was maybe a little too savory; the recipe called for less salt, but I reflexively added more because I think every bread recipe in the book is undersalted. So the hot apple turnovers had a faint saltiness under them, which I actually associated a little bit (not unpleasantly) with McDonald's Fried Apple Pies. Remember those? Ahh, I miss them. The baked ones are so inferior.
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