Raw dough storage

Question

I'm making cinnamon rolls tonight but they're not going to be baked until Sunday morning, what is the best way to store them without baking them until Sunday?

Answer 1

Options

With yeast-leavened dough, there are two approaches you can take:

1. par-bake
2. refrigerate

With chemically-leavened dough, you can't refrigerate, but you get a third option:

3. don't mix. (probably not applicable)

I'll explain all three:

Par-baking

Here, you go ahead and bake the rolls tonight, but only until they're mostly done. You want the dough fully set, but not browned. It's best to look for recipes, but generally this means a slightly shorter bake (e.g., maybe 30 minutes instead of 40) or slightly lower temperature.

Then you freeze them (for very short term—say next day—just leave them on the counter, or—if you're going to serve them warm—refrigerate them for a day or two). They store in the freezer fairly well for up to a few months.

When you want to serve them, you defrost and then put in the oven to reheat and brown (often the defrost and brown are both done in the oven). After baking, you apply the glaze/frosting/etc. as normal.

This is surely familiar—it's the way many commercially-produced frozen baked goods work.

• Advantages: very easy & predictable on the day of service; fairly long storage life.
• Disadvantages: slight quality loss. Enemy here is basically staling, though the reheat/brown will take care of a lot of staleness, at least until they cool. Frozen greatly slows staling (and as almost always, you want to get them frozen as quickly as possible; here you actually want to defrost them quickly as well, because fridge temperatures promote staling).

Refrigeration

Yeast activity can be nearly slowed and stopped by keeping the dough cold, in the fridge. The colder your fridge, the less the yeast will grow. You go ahead and make your dough (probably with a less yeast), and then throw it in the fridge. Sometimes it'll be between the first and second rise, other times before either (even going so far as to use ice water in the stand mixer). Good recipes will tell you about this option, and how to best apply it to the recipe.

On the day of, you take the dough out of the fridge, let it warm up, and continue the process where you left off.

• Advantages: Excellent quality, often the refrigeration step even improves quality, though this isn't likely in a highly-enriched dough like yours.
• Disadvantages: More time day of, and far less predictable. You've got to wait for the yeast to do their thing, on their time table. Also, can only be done for one to three days, depending on how cold your fridge is.

Don't mix

Chemical leaveners are normally activated by mixing the dry and wet ingredients. So, you prepare them and then don't mix them until the day of. Another popular method commercially (pancake mix, cake mix, ...).

Depending on the liquids, you may or may not be able to pre-mix them. E.g., egg + lemon might react over time.

This probably isn't applicable here, especially with the amount of butter you've likely got in the dough. I'm just including it for completeness.

Recommendation

Sounds like you're asking about Christmas morning breakfast, where I suspect you need something predictable & easy. I'd go with par-baking it.