Baking – Why combine AP flour and bread flour

I don't know why About.com warns that "additional protein will increase toughness" when the whole purpose of adding corn starch is to reduce the protein.

All purpose flour should have around 10% protein and 90% starch. Pastry flour has 8% protein and 92% starch. Cornstarch has 0% protein. You only have to mix cornstarch and all-purpose flour in the mathematically correct ratio to get a mixture which behaves like pastry flour in terms of protein toughening.

The numbers above are rounded, but then, different manufacturers will produce flours with different percentage of proteins, and some wheat proteins also get tougher than others depending on the cultivar, and recipes still work with that kind of tolerance. So I use them and mix 80 g AP flour and 20 g cornstarch for every 100 g pastry flour I need, which results in a flour mixture with roughly 8% protein content. I use it primarily for flaky crusts, and it works quite well there.

There should have been 3 rises. The first till it doubled, then an hour after molding it, and finally an hour after cutting the rolls. The dough should have gotten noticeably bigger during each rise, and if this is the case, there's really no way for them to be dense.

If it doubled in the first rise but didn't seem to puff up much by the last rise, your yeast may have simply run out of fuel. To combat this, you can either add a sugar to the dough so the yeast has more food, or cut the rising times a bit so that there's more food for the yeast left in the dough by the last rise.

When punching the dough down, be fairly gentle. You want to knock out the excess gas, but you should be leaving some in. For instance, if the dough doubled in size, you'd want to punch it down to about 1.25 to 1.5 times the original size, not all the way down.

I wouldn't add baking powder to these. Most of the rising potential of the baking powder will be spent long before they're ready to go in the oven. Even if you use a double acting one, it will dramatically change the character of the rolls leaving you with a totally different end result.