Waxed Paper Versus Plastic Wrap

I ran out of waxed paper the other night and wrapped the next two batches of dough in Saran wrap instead of waxed paper. Some recipes say to use waxed paper, and some say to use plastic wrap. The idea is to wrap in something that keeps the dough from drying out by forming some impermiable film between the dough and the air. If it helps the roll to hold its shape, that's a plus, but neither waxed paper nor plastic wrap seem to do anything to help with that as far as I can tell.

I've noticed only one significant drawback to waxed paper. When you roll the dough before you wrap it up, sometimes the dough is pretty soft and sticky. When it's too much like that, it's almost impossible to roll it. That's when it would normally be a good idea to refrigerate it for a little bit before rolling it. But if it's not too bad, you can go ahead and roll it without refrigeration. If it is fairly soft, rolling it doesn't easily result in nice cylindrical rolls of dough right off the bat. If it sticks to the countertop or surface you are rolling on, the more you roll it, the bigger a mess you have, so what I tend to want to do is roll it a little, put it in the waxed paper, and then roll it a little more to get it as cylindrical as it can be.

Where I have a problem is, the distance around the roll is at its minimum when the roll is perfectly cylindrical. If it is not perfectly cylindrical at the time I roll it up - which it never is - then rolling it a bit more until it is more cylindrical results in having excess wrap (waxed paper or plastic wrap) around the cylinder. If it's waxed paper, the excess wrap actually wrinkles and causes the dough to be malformed. I noticed that many times, and the only thing I could do was take the waxed paper off and wrap it again. But where it had been malformed, it was often hard to get rid of the depression and be perfectly cylindrical again. The really nice thing about plastic wrap was that it folds so easily that excess wrap around the dough as it gets more cylindrical doesn't wind up malforming the roll, and so the surfaces of the cylinders are nice and smooth when I put them in the refrigerator.

Besides that, plastic wrap is clear and waxed paper is pretty hard to see through. You can actually see exactly what the roll looks like when you use plastic wrap. I don't know if that actually matters, but it was an obvious difference.

I thought the biggest drawback to pastic wrap was that it's so darned hard to find the corner to unwrap it later! And after I find it, to grab it. I didn't have huge problems. It helps a little that after two hours in the refrigerator the plastic wrap is perhaps slightly less "sticky". Overall I think I like the plastic wrap better, but it's not a slam dunk. Having a nice smooth surface was nice, but the weight of the dough still caused the rolls to become oval, and it's not like the rolls could be turned into truly perfect cylinders by rolling them on the counter anyway. The dough is much too soft for that, and you don't want to press out the air by compressing the dough too much. And the more you roll it using your hands, the warmer it gets and the harder it gets to roll, so there is not enough time to create the perfect cylinder. I'm not sure if you can roll the dough too much because of pressing out the air. I'm just saying there's a limit to how much benefit you get by avoiding malformed rolls from wrinkles in waxed paper - it's still not going to be perfect.

One thing I like better about waxed paper, besides finding the corners easier, was that it holds its shape pretty well, and that helped form the ends of the rolls a bit. The very ends tend to be a little narrower, so after I'd form the roll in waxed paper I'd press the dough at the ends inward a little to make the roll a little fatter at the ends, though a tiny bit shorter. It would then "fill up" the space around the cylinder at the ends, so there was no space between the dough and the waxed paper. It just helped the diameter of every cookie round sliced later to be the same. When I try to do the same thing with the roll wrapped in plastic wrap, it just doesn't work very well. The wrap is not stiff enough to "fill up", so I just kind of push the ends in a bit and however it turns out, is how it turns out.

Despite the difficulty of finding the corners and difficulty of making the ends the same diameter as the center of the roll, I'll probably be using plastic wrap from now on.

One thing I wish I had was a way to keep rolls from flattening from their own weight as they cool off in the refrigerator. Maybe if I take them out after 15 minutes and roll them again a little they would still be soft enough to reform to cylinders again, but hard enough not to lose their shape the second time. I might try that sometime.

The photo shows a roll wrapped in waxed paper on top and a roll wrapped in Saran wrap below. The roll in waxed paper is slightly disheveled because I'd actually thrown it in the garbage and I pulled it out again for the photo. :-) Be aware that the dough is less visible through the waxed paper when you roll the dough than this photo shows - it has become more visible here as the butter permeated into the paper over a couple of days' time. This actually helps you to see that the surface of the dough wrapped in waxed paper is more irregular with crevices, etc. When I saw a crevice of some sort in the dough wrapped in plastic wrap, I could massage it out, but in waxed paper I couldn't see very well in the first place, and if I did see something, the waxed paper simply wasn't flexible enough to "massage out" an irregularity.

You can also see the narrowing at the ends of the rolls. Even the waxed paper roll is narrower at the end - I wasn't as successful at fattening it up by pressing at the end, in this case, as I often am when using waxed paper. That was from the batch I mixed in flour for two minutes, and the dough was pretty soft and sticky, hard to do anything with at all.