The history of morning rolls, including a recipe for making your own | Scotsman Food and Drink (2024)
In every newsagents, corner shop and petrol station across Glasgow (and elsewhere across Scotland) you will find freshlybaked crispy morning rolls, probably piled up on top of a misused ice cream freezer.
McGhee’s bakery, one of the biggest producers of these rolls, sells over a staggering twomillion every week. So this is a bread produced on a massive industrial scale.
McGhee’s infact produce this crispy roll specifically for the Glasgow market; elsewhere in Scotland theirrecipes for morning rolls differ.
Glasgow morning rolls are very light and airy, and very, very crispy on the outside. Whathelps to make them so crispy is the crumby coating they are given; this is actually ricecones, a rough textured rice flour.
The likes of Morton’s rolls are cut by hand producing oddshapes, which makes them all the more charming. They are often very well fired, and this ishow some people prefer them.
Some of them are so black visitors to the city must wonderwhy they are on sale as it looks like someone has made a cock up.
They are also baked sothey touch each other, forming a kissing crust.
When you tug the rolls apart there is a weesoft titbit inside that you can nibble on.
These morning rolls are central to life in Glasgow and other parts of Scotland. They are eaten at breakfast or made intosandwiches for a packed lunch.
Morning rolls must be eaten fresh as they go into rigourmortis by the end of the day.
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They are essential for the ‘hot filled rolls’ served at almostevery café and snack van, filled with the usual suspects of square sausage, or bacon, orblack pudding, with a fried egg to make a doubler, and perhaps a potato scone.
It may notbe the healthiest thing in the world, but it is a wonderful and well loved tradition.
Another favourite way for kids to eat them is for a snack after school, squished down and spread withbutter so thick it leaves teethmarks.
After massively scaling down industrial quantities I have a recipe which is impressivelysimilar to the rolls you get in Glasgow.
I have always wondered how they get them so lightand airy and it turns out the answer is chemicals.
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Morning rolls often containsomething called IREKS Voltex, a multi-purpose bread improver that is used to iron out themillions of variable factors which can affect bread making.
If you produce two million rolls a week, you begin to understand why such a bakery wouldtake measures to ensure they provide a consistent product.
On the other hand the rolls atsome bakeries are batch fermented for up to 16 hours, meaning this bread has flavour; it isnot a bread that is ready within an hour from start to finish like some other mass producedbread.
This recipe is for all the people who are from Glasgow but now live somewhere else,and might happen to miss this great Glasgow institution.
You need to start these the night before you want to eat them, however they last well andtoast very well too.
Ingredients:
• 500g Canadian strong white bread flour (or a flour with a high gluten content, i.e. at least14 per cent)
• 30g lard or vegetable shortening
• 10g sugar
• 10g salt
• 5g fast action yeast
• 400ml cold water
For the Coating
• 50g plain flour
• 50g rice cones/flour
Method:
1Rub the fat into the flour in a large mixing bowl. Stir in the sugar, salt and yeast.
2Now pour inthe water and mix until it is all incorporated. This is a wet dough but when you are usingbread flour with such a high gluten content it can easily take that much water withoutbecoming sloppy.
3Remove the dough from the bowl and knead it for 1 minute until the dough has just becomesmooth with all the ingredients thoroughly combined.
4 With such a long ferment you don’tneed to knead it too much. Put the dough back into the bowl and cover loosely with clingfilm. Put the bowl in the refrigerator to leave it to ferment for 12 - 16 hours.
5 The next morning combine the rice cones and plain flour for the coating. Take a large bakingsheet and dust it liberally with the coating mixture (make sure to leave enough to coat therolls).
6Empty the dough on to a work surface which has been liberally dusted with therice/flour coating mixture. This is where a large silicone spatula or scraper is useful.
7 Nowusing a dough scraper divide the dough into 8 pieces. Don’t worry if it is sticky or messy asthese rolls aren’t supposed to look perfect.
8 Dust your fingers with the coating mixture and take each piece of dough, one at a time, anddip it into the coating mixture and place it on the baking sheet. They don’t need to be in theshape of a roll but try to keep in the air that is inside the dough.
9 Do this with each piece,placing them near to each other so that when they rise they will bake together. Despite thestickiness of this dough the coating mixture works wonders for stopping the dough fromsticking to everything. Leave them to rise for 1 - 2 hours or until doubled in size.
10 Bake in a 250˚C preheated oven on a high shelf for 15 - 20 minutes or until the tops aredark. The rolls should be well fired for the right flavour.
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Firstly let me explain a little history of a morning roll and how would it was made compared to today. Believed to have been around since the 17th century, local Scottish bakers have been making these handfuls of loveliness for their communities fresh every day.
The morning roll is an airy, chewy bread roll popular in Scotland. The well-fired roll is given a stronger flavour in its bulk fermentation and baked at a higher temperature, and has a dark crust. In Fife, a cabin biscuit or cabin roll (/ˈkeɪ. bɪn/ or /ˈkæ.
The bread roll emerged out of the tradition of baking small bread loaves. These gradually became smaller and became known variously across Europe as a bap or a bun, and then simply as a roll or as a small bread (brötchen in Germany, brötli in Switzerland).
The first rolls in the top of the very hot oven would burn on top as the oven cooled down to baking temp. This is the origin of “well fired” rolls – originally a by-product, sold cheaper, for many they became sought after, and bakers have long made them as such deliberately.
La Farine, which opened in 1977 in Berkeley claims to have invented the morning bun. According to company lore, when the bakery's founder, Lili Lecocq, started out, she developed a particularly good croissant dough.
Roll forming began as early as 600 BCE in the Middle East and South Asia. There, they used the basics of what we know today as a rolling mill. However, more streamlined mills, closer to what we use today, were created across Europe and Britain. The design for these came from drawings done by Leonardo da Vinci.
The breakfast roll (Irish: rollóg bhricfeasta, [ˈɾˠoːl̪ˠoːɡ ˈvʲɾʲɪcˌfʲasˠt̪ˠə]) is a bread roll filled with elements of a traditional fried breakfast. It is served at a wide variety of convenience shops, newsagents, supermarkets, petrol stations, and casual eateries throughout Ireland.
So, what is a full Scottish breakfast? Usually made up of bacon, link sausages, Lorne sausage (also known as square sausage or slice), black pudding, haggis, baked beans, fried mushrooms and tomatoes, toast, tattie scones and fried eggs, the full Scottish breakfast is a sight to behold.
“They actually ask for a bap but it depends—we have a soft bap or scotch rolls, crusty rolls are known as Belfast baps, crusty like a tiger loaf.” “To me, bread rolls are a bap.” In Ireland a roll or a bap is commonplace.
I use all of those terms. The most all-purpose word would be “roll” but I would generally be more likely to refer to a long sandwich roll as a “roll” and a round hamburger- type bun as a “bap”. The word “bun” would also be fine here but I tend to teserve this word for sweet rolls rather than neutral or savoury ones.
This could be a barm cake, bread-cake, bap, batch, bun, buttery, muffin, cob, oven bottom, roll or stotty. To add to the confusion, some names mean more than one thing. In the area north of Manchester, bread rolls are called 'teacakes'.
Parker House rolls are named after the Boston Parker House Hotel where they first originated during the 1870s. Legend has it that a disgruntled hotel baker threw a batch of unfinished rolls into the oven after an altercation with a hotel guest.
The first commercially available toilet roll appeared in 1857 thanks to Joseph Gayetty who sold “Medicated Paper for the Water Closet” which was sold in packs of 500 sheets. A few decades later the first perforated toilet paper rolls appeared on the market in 1890 thanks to the Scott Paper Company of Philadelphia.
The tradition began with Robert Taira, the Hawaiian-born son of Japanese immigrant parents who opened a bakery in the city of Hilo in the late 1950s. So beloved were Taira's fresh-from-the-oven rolls that he quickly expanded to a larger facility in Honolulu in 1963.
It has been argued that the breakfast roll became a national dish in Ireland during the Celtic Tiger economic boom of the 1990s and 2000s, becoming synonymous with "Breakfast Roll Man", the archetypal sub-contractor who was busy with construction work and needed sustenance on the move, before the bursting of the Irish ...
Morning Buns are similar to cinnamon rolls, except the dough is made from croissant dough. The croissant dough produces the tender, flakey, buttery layers that you just can't get from normal cinnamon roll dough.
1. It is believed to have originated in China. The Chinese are believed to have invented spring rolls. Spring rolls have a long history in China, dating back to the Eastern Jin Dynasty, which lasted from 265 AD to 420 AD.
The Kaiser roll (Emperor roll, German: Kaiserbrötchen (German: [ˈkaɪ̯zɐˌbʁøːtçən]), Slovene: kajzerica, Polish: kajzerka, Hungarian: Császárzsemle), also called a Vienna roll (Wiener Kaisersemmel; as made by hand also: Handsemmel), or a hard roll, is a typically round bread roll, originally from Austria.
Introduction: My name is Terrell Hackett, I am a gleaming, brainy, courageous, helpful, healthy, cooperative, graceful person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.
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