Food.com
If you love the buns that Schlotzsky's uses in their most excellent sandwiches, you will love these quick and easy sourdough batter rolls. Once you make this recipe, I think you will agree that I have achieved the "Schlotzsky's Style" taste, texture and light crunch in these flavorful dinner rolls. In developing this recipe, I found the the Scholtzsky's recipe online... well they use a proprietary mix plus water and yeast... and do not use a sourdough starter. Obviously, their dry mix contains a "sourdough" flavor so I had to adapt my recipe to use a liquid sourdough starter. I used their recipe to get the approximate ratio of dry ingredients to liquids... but then experimented from there. It took many trial and error attempts... trying ingredients like egg, buttermilk, milk, etc... but what I found was that simpler was better when trying to achieve the authentic taste and left out all those items. Additionally, Schlotzsky's uses a double rise method when making their buns, but my recipe uses a single rise method that is simpler and much faster. From start to finish, including preparation, rise and bake, these rolls can be ready in about an hour and twenty minutes... with very little hands-on time. Since this is a batter bread, the exact size of the wells in your muffin tin is very important... they should hold about 1/3 cup of water. if they are too small, the batter is liable to rise up and still over the boundaries of the muffin tin. You will notice that the recipe is easy to cut in half. This is because I used a small batch when creating the recipe. With these small rolls, you will find that 6 is rarely enough. I suggest planning on about 4 rolls per person. Finally, you will see that I am not a sourdough purist. It is primarily the fast-rise yeast that makes the dough rise. Interestingly enough... while the sourdough starter is used mainly for flavor, the rolls still have the big-hole texture associated with sourdough rolls. I hope you enjoy these rolls as much as we do!
