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Cinnamon rolls are joyful. Pillowy soft. Caramelly sweet. Warming.
Dental floss, on the other hand, is the absence of joy. A fixture in every bathroom, it serves, at best, as a symbol of obligation, rigor, smug commitment to oral health. At worst (if you’re me) it’s a momento mori—a reminder that you should be doing something way more than you’re doing it. By not doing it, in fact, you are depriving yourself of6.4 extra years of life. When I look upon dental floss, I see failure. And the only thing that will make me feel better is acinnamon roll.
But here’s the twist: Dental floss can help you make better cinnamon rolls.
“When you’re you're working with dough for cinnamon rolls and you get to the point where you’ve rolled it up and you’ve got to slice it, a knife, no matter how sharp it is, just ends up squishing it a little bit,” says Benjamina Ebuehi, author of the new cookbookA Good Day to Bakeand contestant on the 2016 season ofThe Great British Bake Off,who alerted me to this the fact that dental floss makes an ideal slicing tool.
Surely you’ve been there. Using your chef’s knife to slice through rolled pastry forjam buns, only to have the dough you’ve carefully kneaded and shaped squish down, its filling oozing out all over the counter? Dental floss—simple, inexpensive, ubiquitous dental floss—solves the problem. (Just, obviously, don’t use the mint-flavored kind.)
Ebuehi says the technique is a little difficult to describe with words: “You shimmy the floss underneath your log of dough and then twist it around the roll and pull it. You want to pull the two ends of floss across each other, and you’ll get this super neat, sharp cut. It doesn’t pinch, and it’s just so quick,” she says. She learned the method from a YouTube video (see it in actionhere) and has never gone back.
You can use the dental floss technique on any kind of rolled pastry—including thechamomile-infused lemon sticky bunsfrom Ebuehi’s new cookbook, which I highly recommend. But, I learned perusing YouTube, people have also used a similar technique tocut cakes into layers. Separating watermelon from the rind and slicing it into cubes with dental floss seems to be athing.And I wasted a minute and three seconds of my life watchingthis manslice through rolls of store-bought cookie dough and burritos with floss. I may not be convinced that this is the superior way to sliceallfoods, though it certainly seems to work.
But for cinnamon (and every flavor) rolls, I’m committed to flossing. Who knows? Maybe this routine will even prove inspirational to my teeth.
