Bread dough variation: sub sandwich rolls

Every Sunday I made sub sandwich rolls for my husband to take for lunch during the week. It saves us money, makes his lunch more enjoyable, and makes me feel like I'm taking good care of him. :)  This dough is made exactly the same as my basic bread dough, it's just shaped differently.  Basically, I just wanted to give you another idea of what you could do with the dough--it's not complicated or anything like that.  So, if you haven't already, head over here to get the recipe and mixing instructions!

So, nothing new here, you've got your dough all mixed, kneaded, and ready to rise:

I like to put a bowl of boiling water into my warm oven with my rising dough--it helps keep the dough moist. This is especially helpful if I'm mixing up the dough and leaving it for a significant amount of time (like going to church or running to the grocery store).

Once the dough has doubled in size, I punch it down and divide it in half.

  Then I divide each half into three equal balls.

 Then I roll each ball of dough into a "snake" of dough (does anyone know the technical term for this?).  I make each "snake" of dough 8-9 inches long. I have found that when I leave the dough to rise, it expands more along the width than the length.

I also flour and then slash the top of each snake because I think it looks cool. I have no idea of this helps it in any way. (Note: you will notice that in some of these pictures I have 6 rolls and in others I have 4--I took pictures of the process two different weeks and used the best from each.)  Halfway through the slashing process:

Then I put the rolls back in the oven to rise and pull them out when they look something like this:

I warm my oven up to 400 degrees F and bake them for 8-10 minutes.  Just a note on the cookie sheet: I've begun using parchment paper (as you see in some of the previous pictures) rather than greasing my sheets and I loooove parchment paper so much more!

Let them cool on a wire rack and put them in a ziplock bag. These rolls keep for about a week, but they do dry out as the week goes along.

~Regina