King Arthur has a European Style Hard Roll recipe I'm going to try, I'm looking for some dinner rolls for Thanksgiving. It uses an overnight sponge or a sourdough levain. You shape the rolls, let them rise, then refrigerate them so that they go into the oven cold, that helps keep the crust thinner.

We won't have family here on Thanksgiving but we will have one or two friends dining with us. We may have family here for Christmas, that's still kind of up in the air.

I'd probably use KA AP, but KA bread flour should be OK, too. The recipe is kind of low in salt (1 tsp to 4 cups of flour or about 1.25%, 2% is more typical), so I would expect it to rise a lot, but not as much as a salt-free Tuscan bread.

European flours are typically lower in protein than US flours, though.

I made Tropical Treat Bread. It's a yeasted bread with lots of chopped dried fruit, and although it is not very sweet, does get some sweet flavors from the fruit. I used pineapple, mangoes, orange peels, apricots and coconut.

Freezing the second batch of rolls for a half hour didn't seem to make a lot of difference, I thought the crust was possibly a little crisper but that could have been due to baking time differences. The ones that had been in the freezer were a little easier to slash.

Neither batch had the eggshell-like crust that is my Grail. But they're pretty good rolls, the overnight sponge gives them some of the blistering of sourdough without the full-out sourdough texture and taste.

We'll see what happens with them when I try to reheat them tomorrow. I put them in breathable (microperforated) bags for the night.

The ones on the left were the ones that spent a half hour in the freezer. They might not be quite as tall, I didn't try to measure them.

They weigh about 62 grams each after baking, a good size for a dinner roll.

I made these in the small oven, so they didn't get steam, I might try that on a subsequent batch. I also think I'd like to see what happens if I sub in some whole wheat flour, rye flour or triticale flour.

With an overnight sponge, a bulk rise of 3 hours and then 1-2 hours of final proof and another hour or two in the refrigerator, these aren't a 'last minute' roll. But assuming they reheat well, I'll probably make more next week for Thanksgiving.

I had one for lunch, the crust had softened overnight but it was still soft and a bit chewy inside. I'll reheat a few of them at suppertime and see how that goes.