When was the last time you felt shy, or nervous, around someone?
For weeks now, I’ve been experiencing a niggling sensation around bedtime—a voice whispers to me, “Put down your phone and read a book!”
I, of course, disregard the voice. Every night tell myself that I’ll start reading the next night; every night that passes makes it harder to start. I’ve know that it’s good for me, so naturally I fight doing it entirely.
What am I doing instead? NOTHING USEFUL. I waste an hour each night doing some version of the following: checking the weather, putting any number of items of clothing into my J.Crew shopping bag then promptly forgetting and never actually buying them, and reading an old posts on interior designing blogs (the relative merits of blue velvet sectional sofas seem to be a particularly pressing issue for me around 9 PM).
One night I spend almost 45 minutes reading about techniques for properly applying eyebrow pencil with a flick of the wrist from various beauty editors. I DO NOT EVEN OWN AN EYEBROW PENCIL. I am only telling you this because we’re friends. I’m not proud of it.
Always I finish the night with a cursory attempt at filling it some of the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle, but even that has lost out to the mindless perusal of the Internet.
I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about this. A steadfast refusal to relinquish this tether (my phone) to the digital world is not a bedtime-only habit. My inclination to dig my heels in when confronted with something I want to change is also a bigger, broader instinct that we all have (at least I hope I’m not alone in that).
So there I go, having thoughts and feelings and feelings and thoughts and analyzing it all when I could just OPEN A G-D BOOK.
And the other night, reader, I did!
I unearthed my Kindle from where it sat tucked into a pocket of my gray quilted MZ Wallace tote at the bottom of the closet. I hadn’t touched it since my last trip to Maine in February. I charged it and watched the screen begin to emit a faint glow as it powered on.
I started with a sample chapter of My Year Abroad by Chang-Rae Lee, but I immediately sensed that it wasn’t the right book to start with. It’s too gritty—the first few pages remind me of The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao: a book that took me by surprise with how deeply I loved it, and how I grew to love the heart of the main character Oscar. He’s a sweaty, swaggering Dominican-American teenager who curses and thinks mostly about girls and sex. Not exactly a kindred spirit of mine right off the bat, but the magic of a great writer is that they pick you up out of your life and set you inside someone else’s, such that the circumstances of both of your lives fall away and your heart echoes the highs and lows and thumps and quivers of theirs. Even if they’re mostly thinking about Latino fantasy stories and a Dominican girl named Lola and smoking weed.
Anyway—I went back to the list of titles I keep of books I’d like to read. And one very lovely reader here (hi Christine!) commented last week that she loved The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne, which is described as a “sweeping saga of post-war Ireland told through the eyes of an ordinary man.”
I opened to the first page and begin to read, and the strangest thing happened.
I felt this odd shyness—a nervousness almost—come over me. It was as if I was about to see a friend I hadn’t seen in years, or an old boyfriend maybe: someone who meant something, and who’d been apart from me for a long time.
I held tighter to the book, feeling self-conscious, like I couldn’t entirely remember how to do this. Do I just…read? The sentences just flow into my head? I felt awkward and fumbling, like I was touching my toe to a soccer ball for the first time since senior year of high school, and wasn’t sure if the muscle memory would kick in.
It took a few nights to quiet the strange sensation. For the voice saying “You really should read!” to subside (and for my instinct to fight against it to disappear)—until I started reaching for the book without thinking.
As with so many habits, the moment before you change is the hardest and most frightening, even if we’re just talking as small and innocuous a shift as reading again.
And with so many habits, too, your muscle memory WILL kick in reliably. Last night, I stopped to notice the difference: How I was just swallowing up pages without even realizing. How I don’t ever feel like skimming over sentences is work. I’m never aware of reading, it just happens, which is what made the recent odd out-of-body blip, when each word felt like taking the first few steps of a run in the morning, even more peculiar.
When I sink into it again, I remember how delicious reading is for me. It’s like spooning up a bowl of slightly melted ice cream, your body practically thrumming with contentedness with each bite. Like you’re still yourself, but also you’re somewhere else entirely.
Books absorb me in a way that little else can: I believe the proper adjective here is engrossing.
Since I was little, one of my most specific—and consistent—form of happiness involves a good book in hand and something to eat: ideally a spoonful of my mom’s oatmeal cookie dough, or a cheese roll warm from the oven, or a stack of the chocolate sandwich cookies my little sister would make me.
A good book snack should be easy to eat. Comforting. It shouldn’t require your full attention—do not mix eating a steak or hard-shell tacos or roast chicken or a slice of kale and Gruyere quiche or a bowl of butternut squash soup spiked with sherry with reading. (Okay, speaking as someone who greatly enjoys eating a very nice meal alone at a bar with a book, it’s obviously doable but you can’t lose yourself in the book the same way.)
Pick something like a thick slab of chocolate chunk-studded banana bread. A sturdy brownie swirled with tahini and toasted sesame seeds. A crisp, tart Braeburn apple. A pile of your mom’s olive oil crackers sprinkled with sea salt. Blueberries, still wet from the colander. Pillowy cinnamon rolls that unravel with a gentle tug to reveal the sticky-dark cinnamon swirl inside.
You get the idea. If the last one appeals, I’d recommend King Arthur’s very aptly named “perfectly pillowy cinnamon rolls” which use the tangzhong method to get an extra-fluffy dough.
Here, you cook flour with milk in a saucepan until thickened, then add that to the rest of your ingredients and proceed with making a standard dough. It’s a quick and simple step that changes the texture and“keeping quality” of the cinnamon rolls pretty drastically.
Try it here, and once you get the hang of how it works, you can use it in other recipes too—it’s best used in higher hydration (wetter) doughs, because when you cook the flour/milk slurry, that liquid gets “trapped” inside the slurry, and doesn’t play a role in your dough. It’s as if you’re effectively removing that liquid, so you don’t want to do this in a recipe that is already relatively lower in liquid to begin with.
If you’re going to adapt the recipe to use the tangzhong method, you’ll also need to add some liquid to ensure the hydration level is high enough that the baked goods won’t end up too dry.
Start by figuring out the hydration level in your recipe: Divide the amount of liquid called for (in grams) by the amount of flour (in grams). Turn that number into a percentage: that’s your hydration level. If you want to use tangzhong, aim for a hydration level of around 75% (meaning the liquid is 75% of the weight of the flour).
Let’s say you want to adapt a basic sandwich bread, or a squishy white dinner roll, to use tangzhong. You find the hydration level and it’s only 68%. Multiply the weight of the flour in the recipe by 0.68 and the resulting number is the ideal weight of liquid. Add enough liquid to get to that number.
OKAY THAT IS A LOT OF MATH, here’s an example. Let’s say you want to make my white sandwich bread and use tangzhong.
Flour weight=840g
Water weight=510g
So the hydration level is 510g / 840g = 60% — I want to up that to 75%, so I multiply 840g x 0.75 to get 607g. That means my water weight should be 607g, not 510g, so I need to add 97g of water (or milk).
When I make the tangzhong, I use 5% of the total amount of flour in recipe and 5 times that amount of liquid. So here, I’ll use 5% of 810g (40g of flour) and 5 times that (202g) of liquid.
I’ll cook together 40g of flour with 202g of milk (you can use water as the recipe calls for that but I prefer using milk for milk) until thickened. I’ll add that to the rest of the ingredients and proceed!
Let’s say you DID NOT WANT to do any of that math and you just wanted a recipe sorted already thank you very much. Understood. Have at it.
(Oh, but make sure you have a great book first!!!)
*Note: I prefer not to ice or frost my cinnamon rolls, even though the original recipe calls for you to do so. This is because these are cinnamon rolls, not cake, and the icing route leads to a particular sunset into which I am not interested in walking when it comes to cinnamon rolls. But as always, you do you.
**The original recipe calls for bread flour. I’ve tried it both ways and don’t find any discernible difference when I use AP, so that’s what I do. Either will work.
Pillowy Cinnamon Rolls
Adapted from King Arthur Flour
For the tangzhong
1/2 cup (113g) milk
3 tablespoons (23g) all-purpose flour
For the dough
2/3 cup (151g) whole milk, cold
2 1/2 cups (300g) all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon (6g) salt
2 tablespoons (25g) granulated sugar
2 teaspoons instant yeast
4 tablespoons (57g) unsalted butter, softened
For the filling
1 tablespoon (14g) butter, melted
1/2 cup (107g) brown sugar, packed
2 tablespoons (15g) all-purpose flour
3 to 4 teaspoons (8g to 10g) cinnamon
pinch of salt
To make the tangzhong: Whisk together the milk and flour in a small saucepan to get rid of any lumps. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until it thickens and the whisk leaves tracks in the mixture. Remove from the heat.
Combine the cooked mixture with all of the dough ingredients in the bowl of a stand mixer and mix with the dough hook until the dough is smooth and springy-looking—this will take about 10 minutes on medium speed.
Place the dough in a large, lightly greased bowl and cover with plastic wrap. Let it rise at room temperature for about 1 to 1 1/2 hours; it should nearly double in bulk and the dough should feel fluffy when you press on the surface lightly with a fingertip.
While it rises, make the filling by stirring together all the filling ingredients.
Once risen, turn the dough out onto an unfloured work surface (it’s not too sticky but if you find it sticks some, you can lightly grease the surface—don’t use more flour though as that can weigh down the dough).
Press/roll the dough into a large rectangle, about 10” x 12”.
Spread the filling evenly over the dough, leaving about 1” bare around the edges.
Roll the dough up into a log, starting with the long side closest to you. Pinch the seam closed tightly to seal.
Use dental floss (MUCH easier than a serrated knife) to slice the log into 1 1/2” wide slices.
Place the slices on a parchment-lined baking sheet and cover loosely with plastic.
Let the slices proof until puffy, about 30 to 60 minutes. While they proof, preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.
Bake the rolls until light golden brown, about 15 minutes.
Remove from the oven and let cool. EAT WHILE READING.