Annihilation Operator
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I have been really busy with work lately, then I traveled for the holidays, then I got plunged into work again so the letter schedule has been suffering and this particular iteration (47th!) became really long. Thanks for bearing with me regardless.
ANNIHILATION OPERATOR*
My boyfriend and I have texted each other almost every night we haven’t been together ever since our third date (we played pool with friends, saw a movie about Charles Manson at the local art theater, got drinks at the one brewery everybody goes to and made out at the bus stop). When we lived in the same town, I thought it was sweet and it made me feel warm and fuzzy. Once a non-trivial number of states wedged themselves between us, the practice started to feel like a foundational block of this big thing we were trying to pull off together. Four years makes for a lot of text messages and we’ve both gone through enough phones for many of them to have be lost. There’s a lot of conversation about food, bad TV and reports from meetings with our respective advisors. It’s not particularly riveting stuff; it is the long-distance equivalent of transcribing a quiet night at home, a boring and predictable domestic routine that means the world nonetheless. It always starts the same, with some casual, informal check-in, a ‘hey how’s your day been’ or ‘hey, how’s your day coming along’. The answer tends to be ‘it’s been ok’ or ‘my day’s been good’ – we’re both terrible at saying we’ve had a bad day.
When I first moved to the United States, I was sixteen and attending an expensive boarding school on a scholarship that seemed (and still does) nothing short of miraculous. My parents insisted we Skype every day and those conversations fit neatly in between my classes and track practice. We kept up the schedule pretty late into my time in college, only skipping days when my afternoons were filled up with discussion sections and physics labs and the time difference got the best of us. In those early days, I was more likely to pick fights through the screen of my refurbished, school-issued computer and significantly more likely to cry on camera. I’d argue politics and yell about how little they knew about how I was living. It was some prime teenage stuff; I cried about my first Advance Analysis math class midterm in college even though I must have been way too old for that already. Over time, things changed within my family so things changed in the way we communicate as well. Five years into my doctoral work, and past the midpoint of my twenties, we don’t talk every day anymore and haven’t for years. My father calls on a semi-regular schedule, but these conversations are brief and revolve around the weather, our house in the woods and Croatian soccer. They’re mundane with not much at stake, emotionally safe. We’ve even changed the video-chatting platform to make it easier to occasionally use my phone to touch base when one of us is not at home. However, I still take most of my parents’ calls in my office, while I’m working, in an environment where you only raise your voice to underscore a point about a topological invariant or a phase transition, not something petty and personal.
Through an unexpected set of circumstances, the people I am most likely to have fraught and frail conversations with come to me filtered through screens and they experience me in the same way. Often, I am grateful for the technological barrier and the delay in reaction it allows for. A really miserable morning can wear off by nighttime and I can forget it had been a part of my day when I try to summarize it. A moment of despair fades away quickly when the two meetings framing it contained more substance. A good run or a few triumphant seconds in Wheel provides enough of an endorphin kick for the day to seem better than it was, the high-note towards its end the signal above the noise instead of being just one more piece of data. My sadness becomes easy to suppress, almost forgettable, as does my anger until they all reappear next morning, right according to schedule. I try to tell myself these moments are worth remembering, that they should be time-stamped and filed just like everything else, that I can still say I’ve had an all-right day, an okay day, a good day even, even if at 11:34 I felt like my work didn’t matter at all and at 18:23 I had been really mad about something my advisor said or did.
Say you consider a set of excitations of some system. You prepare the system, you let it equilibrate, then you deliver some sort of a kick and watch what happens. The system gets perturbed and it develops excitations, particle-like or along the lines of a collective modes, carrying mass or angular momentum. They lie on a spectrum of frequencies and amplitudes and you have to catalogue them. There are low-lying modes and very energetic modes and surface modes and modes that move the center of mass of the system. Different excitations may be most important in different energy regimes but generally you don’t want to neglect some part of the spectrum. Neglecting data typically makes for shoddy science – cherry picking only the things you’d like to see in the excitation spectrum doesn’t tell you anything real about the system.
A few letters ago, a reader hit reply to tell me about this book Rebecca Traister wrote about female rage. They thought I might like it because I had written about not being raised to be quiet. I’ve heard Traister talk about this work on one podcast after another and undoubtedly, she sounded compelling. I believe in female rage. I believe we need it and we have it and we should deal with it. I believe in the caricature of an angry man throwing things off of desks and destroying someone else’s property being replaced by a woman who really has something to be angry about, even if it is just the fact that her anger has always been policed. Girls get told they’re bossy when boys are pegged as future leaders, girls are told they’re spoiled and whiny when a boy might be seen as being in charge – you must have heard this pointed out a thousand times just as I have. Most would agree that we judge women for how they express negative emotions, even those that do honestly think they should be reigning it in, that being decent means being either tortured or happy when you are female. Traister says the common wisdom is wrong and that giving into rage doesn’t eat you up from the inside, doesn’t exhaust you even more than always being polite. On a podcast about writing, Traister says that researching female rage, getting immersed in it in the process, increased her quality of life. She’s been sleeping more calmly, having better sex. She wants to be clear in that she is not recommending being angry as a cure-all, but man has the catharsis of it been good for her.
I am envious of Traister. My negativity, my sadness and my rage feels more torturous than cathartic. It feels petty and cheap and small. It feels violent and destructive and hurtful. In the most sophomoric sense of a dialectic I feel the need to identify everything within me that I have deemed wrong and loudly master it, enslave it, destroy it then re-build myself on that ruin as a foundation. And everyone those things are tied to needs to hear about it. I want to confront everyone that has ever made me feel small or lacking and tell them about it. I want to say: ‘you think you just acted normally but…’, ‘you think you were nice to me but…’, ‘you think you were being helpful but...’, ‘you think you loved me but...’ I want to pass on every bit of insecurity and self-doubt and self-hatred and, packaged in hurt and anger, let it become someone else’s bad feeling. There is nothing cathartic about that. It feels shameful, so I refrain. When I do lose my temper, when I do raise my voice and truly become angry it never lasts long and it is easily stopped. Tears will do the trick as will any indication that instead of an apology I will be met with a grudge. I backtrack my anger, embrace the shame, apologize profusely and let it all turn back onto me. I can’t seem to convince myself that I deserve to be angry, that I get to sometimes be a little petty, that it is fine to make someone uncomfortable every once in a while. I believe in reclaiming the hysteric woman, the near-monstrous form of her from Greek myth, in drawing power from not holding back but in reality, I fail to be any remote facsimile of her every single time. Unlike Traister, I lose sleep worrying what being angry says about me. On the edge of thirty, I still hope I can outgrow some of it instead of having to confront it.
As a teenager I fought with my mother much more often than with my father. I’d slam the doors on the bedroom me and my brother shared and get punished for it. She’d tell me things she must have not meant, and I was never as savvy as my brother would be a few years later and didn’t realize I could also strike below the belt. My father was like my brother – he’d get upset rarely but when he did, he knew how to leave feelings hurt and hold grudges that were acutely felt. Indirectly, he was the one who taught me that you get most power by being silent and letting the other person feel compelled to apologize over and over and over. Sometimes my parents would fight in the car and we’d all be confined in that small space filled with bad feelings with nowhere to escape to, not even a door to slam on the way out. None of these interactions taught me how to hold my own in a fight, how to get utility value or contentment from pain-turned-anger. Maybe I learned something about self-preservation, about making it through the fight in a way that could make everything seem normal the next day but definitely not about winning, about being validated, let alone aboit going on the offensive. In college, I dated a man who held grudges just like my father used to. He always felt disrespected when I raised my voice. We fought often. Once we moved in together he’d exile himself to the couch even though I had never asked him to and I’d plead to be forgiven for getting too emotional, for overreacting, for getting angry. The year before we broke up, on the eve of our graduate careers, a close friend got out of a similarly bad relationship. She dealt with the negativity by embracing the anger, by leaning into a flowery, poetic language of revenge and resentment to an extent that made her former partner profoundly uncomfortable, almost scared. Is that a productive way to deal with sadness and anger? She drew power from becoming a modern-day Medea, I just hoped our terse and silent break up would be washed out of me by moving to a new town, slamming another door.
Following the recent elections in the United States, pundits and papers have been quick to make commentary about the ‘year of the woman’ and point to the record number of women entering congress as a potent marker of where our culture is as another politically rough year comes to a close. The narrative surrounding these elections is compelling; everyone loves a story about underdogs, punching up and the resistance. We are encouraged by the idea of middle-aged suburban moms dipping their toes into politics because what they have heard on NPR or seen on CSPAN has been offensive to them ever since 2016. This is female anger put to good use and it is anger that we have mostly conjectured or assumed because it has not been particularly aggressive or shrill. It is anger with value in utility rather than emotion. Anger that can be turned into the number of ballots, statistics and all other sterilizing tools journalists and politically inclined graduate students and dinner parties have at hand. And as the new class of congresswomen learn the ropes of their new positions of power, some of those commentators have already found it fit to remind us of all the benefits of there being more women in politics – they reach across the aisle more, they are more likely to be unconventional compared to party lines, they are less likely to be hardliners that never budge. They might even care more about healthcare and childcare and all of these things we all need to feel well. These women representing an electorate so scared and angry that they, in some places, turned out in numbers three-, four- or even ten-fold more than in previous years, are quickly being branded by the tired gendered stereotype of women being more agreeable and less trouble than uncompromising male ideologues. We can elect women because we are angry, but we never expect them to show us that anger even once they are given power. I wonder, do they know how to argue without feeling ashamed? Did they learn how to yell back at their parents, their coworkers, their partners without eventually backtracking, without thinking they overreacted because someone else’s feelings also got hurt? Do they know how to take their bad feelings and turn them into power, parlay them into more respect than they are getting now?
On Monday before Thanksgiving, my boyfriend and I were trying to get some early grocery shopping done. His older brother, the one hosting the whole family and plus one’s like myself, had suggested I make some brussels sprouts and as the only vegan at the gathering I have also learned that the best way to avoid all sorts of inconvenience is to just bring an extra dish or two for myself. The night before, while we were dozing off in front of the TV in my boyfriend’s parents’ Brooklyn house, I tried to calculate how many sprouts I needed and how fancy I could get with a vegan dessert. In the morning, as it was becoming obvious that we weren’t the only people trying to get groceries early, I jokingly asked my boyfriend how mad, one-to-ten, he was about having to go to the store when it was crowded. We debated the anger scale I had proposed then joked about both being non-zero baseline mad most of the time. In the store, we got stuck in line and they were out of brussels sprouts, so I bumped up my anger score by a few points and we sort of laughed about it. We went to a different store and in the end it all worked out; no real crisis, no real anger. And had I gotten worked up into a righteous grocery rage, I’m sure that would have been judged to be appropriate, something I would have even let myself include in a text message had we not been there together.
Best,
Karmela
* In quantum mechanics, one can adopt a formalism in which instead of discussing wavefunctions, primary objects of interests are creation and annihilation operators. Given a state of the system, a creation operator can be thought of as accounting for a particle being added to that state while the corresponding annihilation operator removes one. The ground state of the system – its lowest and most stable – can be identified by the fact that the annihilation operator will truly annihilate it i.e. the action of the annihilation operator on the ground state will simply give zero. The behavior of many condensed matter physics systems can be determined by studying a set of combinations of products of annihilation and creation operators (these form Hamiltonians).
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ABOUT ME LATELY
LEARNING: Over the past few weeks, my research has been fairly uniform and steady. I have been neglecting one project for the sake of another since a somewhat new approach seems to be at least mildly productive, so I am pushing it as far as it will go. Often, in theoretical work, researchers start with a hard, and often sort of vague, problem then chip away at it until they can identify a very specific case in which there might be a nice solution. Taking that nice solution and blowing it up into something even slightly more general is often the hard part. I have not stumbled upon any overly grand, wide-sweeping statement about the ultracold system I have been trying to study for a few years now, but I do seem to be on the edge of being able to stitch together some smaller, more specific pieces of its behavior and that is worth pouring time into. I spent the last day or so trying to double and triple check some of the calculations I had actually finished after returning from Thanksgiving break and, despite the possibility of realizing I had been wrong all along, it feels good to be that close to a (small) punchline.
In addition to my research work, these past few weeks have been somewhat heavy on me having to talk about that research as well. First the theoretical physics institute my advisor is associated with hosted a small conference, then a the ultracold atoms group hosted one as well. I ended up committing a Friday and Saturday and a good chunk of a Sunday (usually reserved for work, yoga and cooking most of my meals for the upcoming week) to talks, poster sessions and ‘oh yeah, I’ve heard about that paper’ type of chatter with a side of overly acidic free coffee. I presented a poster on some older work, learned a ton about what some of my colleagues are doing and added a few new terms to my ever-growing jargon repository. There seems to be a new trend among ultracold atoms researchers where fundamental constants of the universe, and some of its basic laws, are tested in table top magnet-and-laser experiments rather than large and expensive colliders and the fact that we can do that still blows my mind a little. Conferences are exhausting but there is always a steady source of exhilaration in seeing just how creative and insightful scientists can be, and that makes the long hours, uncomfortable seats and bad coffee more than worth it.
LISTENING: Before heading off to New York for the break with plans to soak up at least some noise and culture that my small Midwestern town mostly lacks, I did manage to get lucky and saw a really great live performance by the post-metal band Deafhaven. My expectations for these local shows tend to be low as most bands with name recognition don’t seem to care much for the small audiences they can get here, and the Brooklyn-based shoegaze band that opened either proved me right or was so into 2000s style hipster irony that I simply didn’t get it, but the Deafheaven performance brought so much energy and just sheer loudness that I was pleasantly surprised. Their album Sunbather was one of my big discoveries in college and definitely played nicely into my transition from high-school-ish devotion to fastest, loudest, most brutal to more slow and weird strands of metal. It is a very enjoyable record despite the scratchiness of the way the vocals are mixed and I have returned to Deafheaven almost as much as I have to my other grating-yet-soothing favorite Cult of Luna. While I have not been as enamored by New Bermuda, though it is a solid offering, or the latest effort clumsily titled Ordinary Corrupt Human Love, I appreciate that this bands seems to be trying new things and pushing their own vision of what black metal can be transformed into. Regardless, the performance I saw betrayed very little of the pretentiousness that picking up a ‘post’ anything record assumes and I was reminded just how good it feels to be in a very loud space and surrounded by an animated crowd. I think I miss metal shows much more than I acknowledge, and maybe I’ve even forgotten how near-therapeutic they can be. I picked up a vinyl copy of Sunbather because I believe in supporting artists I like but also because I wanted to take home some of that energy that left my ears buzzing. Hopefully not all of that buzz will wear off, even when I have to turn down the record player because my neighbors are home.
As far as Rebecca Traister talking about her book, this episode of Longform gets quite detailed and personal. I am a fan of Longform in general since think it’s really important to understand what kind of work journalism and other forms of writing and reporting entitle and their interviews help with that tremendously. While I would sometimes like to see the, typically pretty sincere and casual, hosts be slightly more critical of the interviewees, many of the conversations are really fascinating, for instance the one with the art critic Jerry Saltz, and worth listening to. Traister also makes an appearance on this episode of Gimlet’s The Cut on Tuesday, which I found myself liking more than I expected I would, and this live edition of Slate’s The Waves. She is particularly animated and sounds almost hopeful in her Waves segment and given the nature of the conversation I appreciated hearing that. Thinking about female rage, I think I also cannot leave out this call-in episode of Death, Sex and Money and this pep-talk segment from Unladylike. These last two episodes are slightly dated but in thinking about female rage I think I would rather recommend what seem to be its sincere expressions than some sort of empty philosophizing. (And if you want philosophizing and punditry, the FiveThirthyEight Politics Podcast has been talking about gender a fair amount in their recent post-midterms episodes).
Unrelated to the theme of this letter, I am still listening to The Dream, a podcast about multi-level-marketing schemes, and Believed, a stomach-curdling investigation of Larry Nassar, and both are about to wrap up their equally excellent and depressing investigations. I have also been tuning into An Arm and A Leg which explores the American healthcare system, sometime I have been pretty invested in ever since, despite having insurance, I paid more than a month’s worth of rent to have one of my teeth fixed last winter. UnErased, Jad Abumrad’s mini-series on the history of gay conversion therapy has also been pretty captivating. These are pretty much the opposite of uplifting so to even things out at least somewhat, completely unexpectedly, this episode of How Stuff Works’ Omnibus on the letter J was actually really interesting and the best kind of completely inconsequential fun-fact background noise and this 99 % Invisible episode about raccoons in Toronto is essentially a design nerd's equivalent of a funny cat video.
WATCHING: Given that Thanksgiving break happened since I last managed to put together a letter, I have been able to absorb a bit more media than usual. The credit for this mostly goes to the big screen TV my boyfriend’s parents often leave unattended in their house and some of his movie-obsessed friends and I am really fine with that – it is actually quite nice to be watching something even when I am not grading quizzes or trying to push my way through an overly ambitious calculation.
However, before the break started, I did take myself on a movie date at the local art theater and saw John Carpenter’s The Fog. The plot of the movie is almost irrelevant to how much I liked it and what it’s selling points are; quite honestly it is pretty thin and not exactly creative. At the same time, the movie is great, and I really enjoyed it: all the shots are framed impeccably, the music works really well, there is lots of suspense and little gore and the whole time I was mildly in love with the lighthouse radio station operator. In a way, the film is an aesthetic and a mood more than it is a fully fleshed-out story but this does not seem to diminish it as a big screen experience at all.
The first show that my boyfriend and I binged upon my arrival on the east coast was the Croatian show Novine (The Paper) which happens to be the first Croatian production to appear on Netflix. My father tipped me off to this show after I shared my logins for the streaming service with him (I wanted him to watch Godless) and he did so with some amount of local pride since it takes place in the city where he grew up – Rijeka – and that I have also always considered home. Watching a Croatian TV show for the first time in many years with eyes trained on American series was somewhat odd and I could immediately recognize that it was filmed to be the Eastern European version of gritty BBC shows where it always rains, almost in the vein of The Killing remake that aired in the US. While this mood makes sense as a backdrop to a story about corrupt politicians, money laundering schemes and honest yet struggling, or maybe just struggling to be honest, journalists it is definitely in stark contrast to images of Rijeka I usually see where the city is painted as sunny and full of culture rather than grime in order to avoid tourists. The fact that the city’s position as a longtime center of Croatian counter-culture and alternative arts (it was a hub of punk and new wave in the 80s despite the communist rule) isn’t incorporated into the story is a missed opportunity but my somewhat insider-ish status helped me the most with the translation and subtitles to this show – some of the idioms were translated clunkily and many profanities downgraded to euphemisms thus taking some of the colorfulness and edge away from English-speaking viewers. Nitpicks about the language and the use of local scenery aside, the show does a decent job when it comes to developing its many characters and fleshing out a pretty convoluted story that hits all the conspiracy, intrigue and crime staples. It shows a few moments of fairly graphic violence, a few really unsettling instances of sexual harassment and even one terrible rape scene which, in addition to other instances of sexism (occasionally balanced by a fairly nontrivial number of female characters, many of whom do seem to have a agency and an agenda of their own) and some questionable use of homophobia and queer characters, does more to make it feel grimy and unsettling than all the shots of old docks (Rijeka is a big port city) combined. Had it all not been so familiar from my experiences with Croatian culture which is still not really progressive in so many ways, I think the show would have been even more unsettling and maybe even slightly offensive to me, but I imagine I would have kept watching it anyway. Turns out that I’m a bit of a sucker for trope-ish crime and will be looking out for season two.
One of my boyfriend’s colleagues and friends is a huge movie aficionado and I have been lucky to be in his neck of the woods a few times when he has thrown some really great movie nights, themes, trailers and a Q&A included. A few days before Thanksgiving we settled into his living room for a more casual screening and gave in to three hours of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. My history with this piece is probably pretty typical: I read the book way too young (and badly translated into Croatian), kept hearing about the movie but never saw it, made references to it for years anyway. My reaction to finally seeing it is probably quite typical as well because I can’t really claim I understood the film but I was really wowed by it nevertheless. Even knowing what it was about and being more or less familiar with the most iconic pieces of its imagery I was still really taken by the use of music and sound in general (alternating astronauts’ breathing with either sound or silence is simply genius in certain scenes), the long slow shots, the visual design and the way important parts of what is really a very disjointed story are punctuated to the point of unforgettability. Of course, this movie is a classic and there is not much new I can say by acknowledging how good it is but it definitely deserves its share of credit, especially since I had to keep reminding myself how long ago it was made despite its polish and believability when it comes to more tech-y aspects of the plot. And if you ever have a chance to watch a movie touching on AI feelings and intelligence with a group of psychologists, I would recommend that as well.
Finally, in the last few days of the break, we started watching Amazon’s adaptation of the Gimlet podcast Homecoming. Given that the bulk of Homecoming’s story is about suppressed or even erased memories it is sort of ironic that neither me nor my boyfriend could really remember all the twists and turns from the podcast but as a testament to its writers we both recognized parts of dialogue from it and spent more time debating the choices Sam Esmail made in directing this show than the minutia of its plot. The story really worked as a podcast and I remember finding it compelling. The show has a lot going on and I found my enthusiasm for it oscillate quite wildly from episode to episode. Esmail is sort of giving it the Mr Robot treatment but not quite, and at times it feels like an extension of some particularly long and outrageous fantasy lifted from that show. Had Rami Malek walked in on some of the sequences featuring Shea Whigham digging through old files in a giant, X-Files style, archive or a shot of Bobby Cannavale trying to woo investors over a game of golf while never separating from his Bluetooth headphones, I would have not been at all surprised. The frustrating thing about this show is that it has so many good visual ticks, so many nice details and clearly Esmail is channeling a lot of paranoia heavy genre-stuff into it. However, all of this strikes me as being turned up to 11 when an 8 or a 9 would do better and the show occasionally veers too deep into camp and dulls the actually unsettling uncertainty and rather sinister hints of conspiracy I remember from the podcast. Maybe this is a good incentive to revisit it and give myself more to process rather than being overly stuck on how terrible of a haircut Julia Roberts had been given in the Amazon version.
SEEING: Whenever I am in New York for more than a few days we try to spend at least one day at a museum of some sort. This time my pick was the Museum of Modern Arts and the exhibit titled Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948-1980. Even though I was born just after Croatia had become independent, I still felt compelled to go see this exhibit as a part of keeping in touch with parts of my history I rarely interact with. I had some sense of Yugoslavian design and architecture having been interesting and genuinely good but a lot of what was on display on MoMa still made a very strong impression me. As with watching Novine, I did have the odd feeling that comes from processing an artifact from ‘home’ while on the other side of the world that feels home-adjacent or more, but even without that layer of meaning the sketches, models and photographs presented as a part of the story of building a modern, functional and very concrete-heavy Yugoslavia were quite fascinating. The connection between politics, philosophy and architecture is a particularly potent one and having the dreams of a modern socialist utopia so clearly represented in functional gray shapes that still managed to sneak in some unexpected curves and ornaments presented so systematically was definitely very impactful. More than worth spending time in the nothing but utopian subway on our way to MoMa for sure.
EATING: During the break I ate a lot and I cooked and baked even more. I made a spinach and coconut curry, I roasted every vegetable that was forgotten in whatever fridge was most handy, I made brunch and pumpkin bread and brought three vegan items, including a raw ‘cheesecake’ to family Thanksgiving. Half a week later, back in the work routine and all, in all honesty I still feel a bit of an itch to bake and my first attempt at scratching it last week were the cinnamon, chocolate, pecan and raisin rolls I am sharing below. I adapted the soft yeasted dough from this recipe, then improvised the filling with what caught my eye in the pantry. For yeasted rolls, these are fairly quick and not too terribly fussy and could easily be adapted to more classic cinnamon rolls, made savory with a few substitutions or even left plain is classic dinner rolls. I’m guessing I’ll be making them again pretty soon.
For about 8 rolls or 10 buns you will need:
For the dough:
2-2.5 cups all-purpose flour
2 ¼ tsp (one 0.25 oz package) quick rising yeast
1 tsp salt
½ tsp cinnamon
½ cup warm water
½ cup warm almond milk or other milk of choice
¼ cup olive oil or melted coconut oil
¼ cup maple syrup
For the filling:
¼ cup pecans, chopped into small pieces
2 oz baker’s chocolate, unsweetened or bittersweet
¼ cup raisins or other dried berries
¼ cup maple syrup (or more to taste)
Splash of milk as needed
Make the dough: In a large bowl mix 2 cups of flour, yeast, salt and cinnamon. Whisk or stir together to combine well. Make a well in the center and pour in the wet ingredients: water, milk, oil and maple syrup. Mix together until combined. Add more flour as needed until a soft dough forms. It is okay if it remains slightly sticky but you should be able to knead it with floured hands. For me this took very little additional flour, not more than 1/3 of a cup.
Knead the dough for a few minutes until smooth and elastic then cover the bowl with plastic wrap, place a clean kitchen towel on top and let rest for 20 minutes.
Make the filling: first melt the chocolate by either microwaving it in a bowl in 30 second bursts or putting it in a bowl sitting on top of a pot of boiling water (this is an improvised double boiler) and stirring. Stir in maple syrup and milk if the mixture seems too thick and taste to adjust sweetness.
Toast the pecans: heat a non-stick or a cast iron skillet then add the chopped pecan and let cook for a few minutes, stirring constantly until you see some pecans become slightly darker and they smell more fragrant. If you want you can sprinkle them with a bit of cinnamon at this point but only after transferring to a bowl so that the cinnamon does not burn when touching the skillet.
Line a casserole dish or two round cake pans with parchment paper or grease with extra oil
Assemble: Roll out the dough into a large thin rectangle on a lightly floured surface. Spread the chocolate mixture over the rectangle, leaving a bit of space by the edges. Use a spoon as the mixture will be thick. Sprinkle toasted pecans and dried berries over the rectangle then roll it tightly towards you. Cut the roll into halves then quarters then eights.
Place your rolls in the pan, pressing down on them slightly to make them a bit more flat, and leaving half an inch or so of space between them. Cover the pan with plastic wrap and a kitchen towel above that then let rise in a warm place for 30-45 minutes.
Preheat the oven to 350F.
After rolls have risen (they should be visibly larger and more fluffy), bake them for 20-25 minutes until golden brown. If you press down on a roll that has baked for enough time, the dough should slightly bounce back.
Enjoy with some powdered sugar, your favorite glaze or some extra maple syrup.
Tips: As this is a yeasted dough, it is important that it actually rise (the second rise will be the most obvious) and you have to be slightly careful to not kill the yeast so don’t use scalding hot water or milk. The other thing that will make these rolls more chewy than fluffy is adding too much flour so boldly aim for a softer, almost sticky dough and just flour your hands, rolling pin and work surface as generously as needed.
These rolls are (refined) sugar free as written and not terribly sweet but you could substitute maple syrup for white or brown sugar or simply increase the amount if you prefer sweeter desserts.
The filling options are endless here. For a classic cinnamon roll you would combine melted butter with cinnamon and sugar but there is really so much more. You could grate some apples then toss them with lemon juice, cinnamon and raisins for an apple pie riff or use a pumpkin butter or a jam for something less labor intensive and more seasonal. Some peanut butter melted with a bit of coconut oil or butter and milk would also work and in that case I would definitely opt for a sprinkle of chocolate chips on top of the peanut layer as well.
For savory versions omit the cinnamon from the dough, opt for olive oil, and cut down on the amount of maple syrup, then mix in 1/4 tsp or more of your favorite herbs such as basil or oregano and use a savory filling. A classic combination would be marinara and (non-dairy) cheese for a pizza variation or just cream cheese and spices. In the simplest version you could brush the rolled out dough with a generous amount of olive oil then sprinkle on fresh or dried herbs and some red pepper flakes then rolls those up into easy herbed rolls. If you have access to an International store of some sort, like I luckily do, you might also consider ajvar or, more easily found, an olive tapenade or a pesto.
Finally, these rolls do not have to be rolls at all. Cut the dough into rectangles and place a teaspoon or so of jam or chocolate spread in the middle of each, then pinch the edges together to create a filled bun. Arrange these buns somewhat more tightly in a round baking dish, seam side down. Alternatively, omit any sort of a filling and just roll the dough into balls that will bake up into soft dinner roll type bread.