Food Focus - April 2024 - Pandesal (Filipino Bread Rolls)

When I first started looking up recipes and wanting to gather more information on Filipino Food Culture, one of the things that I was interested in was their form of "bread." Bread is one of my weaknesses, and coming out of my revisiting of Irish food and what was really at the heart of Irish Soda Bread, I was excited to learn what new types of bread are part of different cooking cultures. I had found Lalaine at her KawalingPinoy.com recipe website and I was so excited about the different things I was finding. The recipe that stood out to me the most, though, was Pandesal. Not only was it a savory-sweet roll, it was also used as the base for several sweet-treat and filled-roll recipes. What a great foundational recipe to discover and, I figured, if I could master this, then maybe there would be some delicious sweet-treats in my future.

Pandesal is a yeast roll that I thought would end up like a Hawaiian Roll, but instead reminded me of the yeast rolls we used to get at Golden Corral. Pandesal were a smidge denser (or my arms weren't strong enough to knead for 10 minutes). I don't feel I can fairly judge my pandesal against traditional Filipino pandesal. I don't know what I did wrong, if anything, but I felt like my rolls were supposed to be a little less stodgy and a little more fluffy. Regardless, they taste delicious warm and with butter. I am, though, intrigued by the other flavors and being baked with a filling (ex: ube, nutella). I had these rolls with all of my first week of meals and it went with all the flavors that mingled on my plate. A really great vehicle for nabbing all those plate clinging tastes of the Philippines. 

I'm not much of a breadmaker, so this was tedious work. There were numerous proofs and the directive to knead the dough for 10 minutes (I have an injured that didn't allow me to be as rough and touch as I might have needed to have been). I did discover that I have a proof setting on my oven, which was very exciting as my husband keeps the house on the cooler side. I also hadn't used the setting before, so maybe I didn't set it right for this item. I also didn't use plastic wrap out of paranoia of putting it "in the oven." I used a large kitchen cloth and wrapped the bowl in it. This might have also affected the way the dough turned out. I, um... also forgot the breadcrumbs, despite the canister being right in front of me when I rolled out the rolls.

Potential missteps aside, my family enjoyed the pandesals, even outside of the meals. It was worthwhile to learn about, but I don't know if I have the patience or arm muscle for this level of breadmaking. I continue to reflect on our predecessors and how they had to make everything from scratch if they wanted to eat it and I'm always so thankful that's not the case in my life now.

Recipe from:   https://www.kawalingpinoy.com/pandesal/