Sweet Potato Almond Butter Rolls
A little bit of what it’s like to work in a high production bakery, oh and a delicious sweet potato cinnamon roll recipe!
Hi everyone!
Today’s recipe is so good, i mean, they’re all good but this one is really special. It’s the first yeasted recipe I’ve posted and as usual, there was some trial and error to getting it just right for you. If you’ve never made cinnamon rolls or brioche before, I think this is a great recipe to start with. Working on this recipe brought me back to some early bakery memories that I hope you’ll enjoy hearing.
My first job in San Francisco was working front of house at Jane the Bakery. I had worked in bakeries before moving to California but was intimidated by baking in a setting as large and well respected as Jane. So, I applied to be a cashier with the hopeful plan to someday worm my way into the back of house to be a baker.
The bakery was very popular and on weekends it was especially hectic. It wasn’t uncommon for the line of customers to stretch down and around the block on any given Saturday or Sunday. Thousands of breads and pastries went out the door in an unrelenting whirlwind of customers with screaming children, barking dogs, and little patience. Within months, I knew I needed to jump the counter to what I thought would be a more peaceful working environment in the back.
At the time I was baking a lot at home, and knee-deep in cookbooks. On most days I would bring a cookbook to work and read on my lunch break. One day this caught the eye of the pastry chef and from then on we started talking more about baking. He shared book recommendations while I would ask about techniques and ingredients that I had only read about but not seen in person. Eventually he asked the question, “Why aren’t you back here baking with us?”.
The question stunned me. I was passionate about baking but I knew I lacked the education to work in such a high production setting. But it turned out that very few people in the bakery had actually been to culinary school. Most of the bakers had gone to school for something else or come from completely unrelated fields. After the chef and I talked through this and many of my fears were comforted, we set the date for me to stage* on the pastry team to see if I would be a good fit in the bakery.
*A stage is a (usually-but not always) unpaid work day or shift in a professional kitchen to learn under a chef or to assess whether you’re a good match for the job/position. From French “Stagiaire” meaning intern.
To make a long story slightly shorter, the stage went very well despite my nerves. The chef commended me for my attention to detail but said I would need to pick up the pace in order to tackle a typical day’s production to-do list. He hired me and assured me there would be time to fill the gaps in my knowledge and that my speed would increase with enough repetition.
I soon learned that working in a bakery is 90% repetition. Production never ends when you’re open seven days a week and the pastries are disappearing from the shelves as quickly as they can be restocked. For my first year, I worked the 5:00AM bake-off shift. The first few weeks I was paired with a fellow baker who trained me in baking each type of pastry properly and then I was on my own. I quickly learned how to bake and decorate hundreds of pastries in the span of two hours everyday before the bakery opened.
After bake-off, my focus shifted to tasks on the production list like mixing huge batches of scones, whisking gallons of pastry cream atop an induction burner, and rolling logs of cinnamon rolls to be sliced and frozen for future bakes. Our cinnamon rolls were a featured item on weekends. They were very big and very popular. A well baked brioche wrapped around a sticky cinnamon filling, topped with a big helping of tangy vanilla cream cheese frosting. Impressive to say the least.
I made thousands of these that first year and took pleasure in how handling the dough reminded me of working with slabs of clay in ceramics class. I became really skilled in rolling the logs tightly and uniformly so as to not lose the delicious filling. I could make an entire weekend’s worth of cinnamon rolls in about forty five minutes. I learned something new from every shift at the bakery and got much faster at every task. Repetition was a great teacher even if at times it became the enemy to my enjoyment of the job.
Three short months into this new career, the entire world seemed to turn upside down overnight. The days were long and only felt longer as we moved through the COVID-19 pandemic as newly anointed “essential workers”. The heavy weight and fear of those times were buoyed by the knowledge that as long as I kept showing up to make the cinnamon rolls, people would safely show up to buy and enjoy them and maybe that would be a helpful thing.
What is Brioche?
Brioche is what we call an “enriched” dough. The ingredients that do the enriching are butter, eggs, and sugar. All three of these ingredients inhibit the formation of gluten. I like to think of gluten formation in a bread recipe like a muscle. In professional settings, we often refer to the properties of gluten as the “strength” of a freshly mixed dough. By strength, we mean the doughs ability to be stretched, the ability for it to spring back after being stretched, and the ability to keep its form after being shaped or baked.
A few notes…
Why the added sweet potato? Besides providing flavor, the potato adds sweetness and the extra starch helps retain moisture, ensuring these rolls stay supple for days after baking. Give these a 30 second trip in the microwave if eating the next day.
Originally, this recipe used purple sweet potatoes. You can find them in certain grocery stores under the name “Stokes” or the Japanese “Okinawa” potato. If you can’t find either, feel free to use orange sweet potatoes like I have here.
The butter used in all parts of this recipe should be very, very soft. Use a microwave in 5 second bursts, rotating the stick of butter between each go to soften the butter quickly. Or better yet, leave the butter out of the fridge overnight to thoroughly soften.
Sweet Potato Rolls with Cinnamon Almond Filling and Sour Cream Vanilla Glaze
Makes 12 rolls in a 9x13 pan
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