Flour + water + salt + yeast = ?

Regardless of how often I make bread, I'm still amazed each time at how it works. It's just a simple combination of ingredients, mixed together, left in a warm place, and then baked, but there are so many variations and it (nearly) always tastes good. And just watching dough grow, transforming itself from a tight floury ball to a springy, elastic mass, is fascinating.

Yesterday, I made Dutch Crunch Bread. Now, I've lived over here for more than 5 years, but have never come across it. Perhaps I'm shopping in the wrong places. But the pictures looked lovely and I have a bag of rice flour that I'm trying to use up, so it seemed extremely fortuitous when I found this recipe. How did I get on?

First up, the dough. Gorgeous.



Then came shaping the rolls and spreading them with this odd yeast/rice flour topping. I might have used a bit too much.



However, this didn't affect the end result. Light bread rolls with an intensely savoury, crispy topping. The Dutch just might be on to something with this.



Next time, I'll make smaller, rounder rolls, coat them with less topping -- I'll bake the rest separately for PJ to nibble on -- and I might try striping the mix so that they look more like the rolls in the picture. But definitely a recipe to add to the growing collection.