Home, Cooking: Weezie Rolls

When I was younger, my maternal grandparents had a Christmas tree farm in New Hampshire, where we all met for Thanksgiving and Christmas and whatever bits of time we could carve out in the summer. There was a farm pond with a rusted rowboat that iced over perfectly for pond hockey, a yard where we played Capture the Flag with the grown-ups as a special treat before holiday dinners, and a big old exploration-ready barn, full of odds and ends that might give you tetanus if you stepped on them just right. As Neil Young says, “all my changes were there”; for us cousins, nostalgia for “the Farm” will never fade.

I didn’t realize until much later that some in the older generation must have seen these visits as a bit of a gauntlet. This wasn’t a big place, and there were four siblings, each with their own kids. Where, I wondered when I started to care about things like “personal space,” did everyone sleep? At the time I was too busy being excited about lining my sleeping bag up alongside five cousins to think too hard about the fact that we were about to take our night’s rest in a walk-in closet. (That closet, I recall, slept just fine.) 

The “Weezie” in these rolls is my aunt, Louise, who lives in Vermont, and whose rolls are always a star of our Thanksgiving and Christmas gatherings. I decided, a few years ago, to make them all the time, because I like them, and oats are good for you.

Weezie Rolls

Ingredients

• 1 cup old-fashioned rolled oats
• 2 cups boiling water 
• ½ cup molasses
• ½ cup water
• 3 tsp. active dry yeast
• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 cups spelt flour (such as Shagbark), plus a bit more to make the dough come together
• ½ tbsp. kosher salt 
• 1 tbsp. softened butter
• 2–3 tbsp. butter to grease the bowl and pans and to melt to brush on top

Directions

1. Put oats in a 2–cup measure (this will fit them as they expand). Pour the hot water over the top. Let sit for about an hour, until they’re soaked and have cooled a bit. 
2. Place molasses, water, and yeast in the bowl of a stand mixer (if using). Let the yeast start to bloom.
3. Put soaked oats, flours, salt and butter into the mixing bowl and, using the dough hook, mix until the dough starts to come together. If it’s wet and sticky, add more spelt flour until it’s smooth and comes away from the sides of the bowl. (You can definitely do this stage kneading the dough on a surface, with human power, rather than with a stand mixer.)
4. Shape dough into a ball, put into a bowl greased with butter, and grease the top of the dough as well. Cover the bowl. Let dough rise, about an hour or 90 minutes. (You can put the dough into the fridge at this point and let it sit until you’re ready to return to it. If you do this, make sure to leave about 3 hours between the time you get the dough out of the fridge, and when you plan to bake it.)
5. Punch down the dough, knead a bit and divide, divide, divide until you have 24 little units of dough. Roll each dough wad between your hands until you have a ball. This is rustic! No need for perfection. 
6. Preheat the oven to 350. Grease two 9– or 10–inch round cake tins with butter. Arrange 12 dough balls in each. Put a dish towel over top of the tins, and let sit for 30–60 minutes. (This is a forgiving recipe. I sometimes run out of time and cut this second rise to 20 minutes. They puff up in the oven, and come out fine.) 
7. Melt the remaining tablespoons butter in the microwave, and brush over top of the risen rolls. Place in the oven and bake for 20 minutes. Remove from the oven, turn out onto racks and let cool as long as you can stand it.