Sour Cream and Chive Fantails
One of my favorite recipe concepts from late Gourmet years is Ruth Cousineau’s buttermilk fantail rolls. It’s a startling simple recipe — a buttery, yeast-raised roll — with a brilliant twist: rolling it thin, brushing it with butter, stacking it in little piles of squares, turning each into the cup of a muffin tin. In the oven, the rolls spring open like a fantail, just the loveliest thing. Why make ordinary rolls if you could make rolls that evoke a highly agile bird known for taking intricate looping flights through the air, entrapping prey in their fanned tails? Or if that’s not the energy you want on your holiday table, Gourmet described them at the time as a “blooming flower, with each petal forming a perfect pull-apart bite.”
Over the years I’ve tweaked them quite a bit, though, using a smaller amount of sour cream for the buttermilk, an egg for a little stretchy tenderness, dropped the butter slightly, bumped up the salt, and then this year, because I want what I want and nobody talked me out of it, gave it a most blissful sour cream and chives vibe. I hope you bring the same energy — only the foods you love the most, made exactly the way you like them — to your quieter holiday table this year.
Ingredients:
- 6 tablespoons (90 grams) warm water (about 115°F)
- 1 tablespoon (15 grams) granulated sugar
- 2 1/2 teaspoons active dry or instant yeast (from a 1/4-ounce or 7-gram packet)
- 1/2 cup (120 grams) sour cream or plain yogurt
- 1 large egg
- 4 tablespoons (60 grams) unsalted butter, melted
- 3 cups (390 grams) all-purpose flour
- 1 1/4 teaspoons fine sea salt
- 4 tablespoons (60 grams) unsalted butter, melted
- 1 teaspoon onion powder
- 1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
- Two pinches fine sea salt
- Flour for dusting
- 2 tablespoons minced fresh chives, plus 1 teaspoon for garnish