Milk rolls (panini al latte) is an original Italian recipe: soft and delicious, you can eat them with several ingredients.

Ingredients

• • 1 1/4 – 1 1/3 cups of fresh whole milk

• • 5 Tbsp of sugar

• • 1 packet of yeast: this one is a quarter ounce

• • Half tablespoon of salt

• • 3 and a half tablespoons of softened butter

• • 4 cups of strong flour or flour for breadmaking

• • A small cup of flour and an egg for washing the finished dough.

Directions

1. First of all, place the dry yeast into a small bowl. We’ll need to moisten and feed the yeast to activate fermentation. To do this, put one or two spoons of sugar into the yeast (whichever you’d like) and add a bit of the milk which at this point must be at least 95F which is just warm. Not hot, and not cold. Add a bit of milk, and then mix together. After a while, you may see a bit of foam at the top of the mix…this is the fermentation process at work! Add the rest of the sugar to the rest of the milk and add the salt as well. Mix it all together well.

2. In this bowl, I’ve placed the flour and formed an indentation into which I’ve poured the yeast mixture and the other milk mixture. In the meantime I’ve melted the butter and now I’ll add this to the bowl and form it into a dough. When you’ve formed the dough into a ball in the bowl, turn it out onto a worktop and knead it for at least 15 minutes. The dough needs to be soft and elastic but not sticky. You can also do this in a mixer with a bread hook attachment.

   Here we are. Once the ingredients are all incorporated, sprinkle a worktop with a bit of flour. Use as little flour as possible and begin to knead the dough. Once the dough is smooth and unified, place it into a bowl (preferably glass) and cover with plastic wrap and leave it to rise for at least two hours or until it’s doubled in size.

3. And here’s our lovely risen dough. Now, remove the plastic wrap, turn the dough out onto a worktop, and begin to work it into shape. Remember to only use a bit of flour if you find the dough is tacky. Work the dough into a tube. From this shape you can cut the individual rolls in pieces of about an ounce each.

4. Here are the formed rolls. You can see I’ve cut the pieces from the tube in pieces of about an ounce each. If you want, you can weigh them for accuracy. If you’ve cut one too big, just cut it back to size and work the excess back into the tube for the next one. Now, take a little piece and work it by folding the edges of the piece in towards the center forming a ball. Then pinch the center bit together to fuse all the folds to each other. Turn the roll so the pinched part is facing down onto a baking sheet covered with parchment paper. Then coat the rolls in a wash of room temperature milk and leave the rolls to rise for another half hour or until they’ve doubled in size.

5. Once they’ve doubled, whisk an egg in a small bowl and give an egg wash to each of the rolls before baking. After this we’re ready to bake our rolls for about 18 minutes in an oven set to 425F or until the rolls are golden brown.

6. And finally, here are our lovely Panini al Latte. If you’ve prepared them before you’ll be using them, let them cool and keep them in a covered container.