Christina Tosi’s Cinnamon Buns recipe

You're not just going to eat one. You're probably thinking now, I'm just going to eat a little bit. But I challenge you, resistance is literally useless. How are you guys doing? I'm Christina Toy from Milk Bar. I just published an exciting new cookbook called Bakke Club. This is my digital online community for baking goods, in which I like to bake everything from sweet to hearty. And I brought one of my absolute favorite recipes for baking. When I was a child, we used to have cookies, cakes and cakes in the house. My materials were really enthusiastic bakers, but a specialty that always left them were cinnamon rolls. As a child, I was definitely a little shopping lover. That meant that I always had this incredible smell of brown sugar and cream cheese glaze in my nose and had these big, fluffy cinnamon rolls in front of me every Friday evening. And so I probably lived from my 16th or 17th year of life to this day. I perfect my recipe for cinnamon rolls. Cinnamon rolls may seem a little too complex and unattainable to some people. But the most important thing first of all, with everything I do at home as a baker and especially in the Bakke Club, you demystify all the self-talk, why you can or cannot do something yourself, bake or cook. So, throw these thoughts overboard and just jump into the cold water with me. So, the most important thing first, the bundo. I always stir the yeast to make sure that it is alive and active. That there are no lumps or clumps. And you know that it is alive and lively and can do its job when it foams like that. And when your dough is a nice, fluffy mass, it's time to knead it. Gluten is what you want in bread. Gluten are these ten fibrous pieces that make bread so, so, so tempting and appealing. That's why we just can't do without bread, can we? So when we bake bread, we want a lot of gluten in it. And to maximize the amount of gluten in our bread dough or in this case cinnamon roll dough, the ingredients should be kneaded for a total of 7 minutes as soon as they form a mass. I didn't come up with this number. It's a number that you can look up on the Internet to see how much gluten is produced. 7 minutes make sure that the gluten develops the best. And the gluten develops by stirring the flour with the wet ingredients. We clean the bowl, grease it, put the dough balls back in the bowl and let them rest for an hour, go up, go up and double in size. We need two more steps to take on our recipe. The first step is a brown sugar mass. This is the cinnamon roll in a classic cinnamon roll. This is a good opportunity for us to talk about the history of taste, because the history of taste is for me the centerpiece of everything and everyone. M, if you cook something in your own kitchen at home or in your professional kitchen, what would you like to express? Which flavors do I combine and why? What am I actually doing here? Your brown sugar dough can really be anything. You could say I want to make a nutty coconut filling. And I want my core, my taste to be like German chocolate, but with a vanilla flavor. The holidays are coming up and I want it to be a cinnamon roll with a sugar cane flavor. So it's all up to you as far as the taste is concerned. Mine consists of light brown sugar, cinnamon, butter and salt. Our bread dough has doubled. Now it is richer and fattier, so that it has a natural shine. If you take it out of the bowl, it should come out very easily. If I stab the dough, it should have a depression with the finger. This is really the Pillsbury Duff Boy moment. That's exactly what you want. We want a nice, even rectangle that is both thick and thin. Normally I do it in the middle and then roll it out. I roll it out in the middle and then roll it out. No matter whether I roll it away from me or towards me, you get the most evenly rolled dough when you start in the middle and then pull in one direction. Pay attention to even body weight and pressure. Since it is bread dough, it looks like a huge amoeba. This dough is very transparent, because you can pull a little of it up without tearing it. And thus bring it closer to a beautiful, pretty, picturesque rectangle. I'm looking for a longer rectangle, because this roll dough is enough for 12 rolls. So I'm looking for a rectangle that is long enough to be able to divide it into 12. As soon as I have a nice, even rectangle, you can be a little less picky how and where you put the rolling pin, to achieve the desired effect and maximize the amount of dough on your work surface. Then you take the brown sugar mass, which is nice and homogeneous. And you just put it on the work surface. And spread it as evenly as possible to the edges of your dough. You roll your cinnamon roll literally into a huge roll of dough. And you roll it away from you. This dough is very transparent thanks to all the butter. I just take the fingertips and start with the roll of dough, because somewhere you have to start. And I just try to form a nice, long line. A part of the dough will try to roll back. That's not a big deal. Just keep going. Again, very transparent dough. Speaking of nostalgia, it's as if you were channeling your inner self, like a first grader or a little kid for me. It's as if you were playing with your children. And then you try to place this dough so that this seam is down here. Then you know that you're done with the rolling. I just grease a 9x13 pan. You just want to arrange the dough for the roll of dough and know that it spreads a few times in both directions when it goes. I don't want my cinnamon rolls to look too tasty in the pan. I make three rows with four rolls each. These rolls let them rest for another hour and rise. They will rise. They will rise. They will be twice as big. So they come into the oven preheated to 190 degrees Celsius until they rise, caramelize and turn brown and smell like a teenager in a shopping mall for a moment. These cinnamon rolls come hot out of the oven. They have risen. They have doubled. We can see these brown sugar slime windmill moments. What I love about cinnamon rolls is that no two cinnamon rolls are the same, even if they come from the same batch. So a little bit on each. I let the glaze melt a little through the heat. And then I just take my spoon and go back and forth a little bit. For me, it's just the right amount of cream cheese glaze. I love it when a little bit of the snail looks out at the tips, top and bottom. This is my cinnamon roll. Whatever your taste is, I can hardly wait to see what you all bake. And I hope that your inner 16-year-old will give me a sign of peace. Enjoy your meal!