The Best Homemade Dinner Rolls You’ll Ever Eat

Dinner rolls are actually a super sexy , super satisfying and honestly like one of the better parts of a big banquet meal .

It's a very easy introduction to , to do an introduction to bread .

But dinner roll is basically like your fourth utensil , right ?

So you have your fork , your knife , your spoon and then you have your dinner roll and that's what's gonna help sop up all of like the really best parts of your dinner .

So respect it .

There's a bunch of different types of flour out there .

You've got the whole wheat that has the brand in there .

You've got almond flour , all these different gluten free options .

Nowadays , we're going to use all purpose when you're starting out making bread .

All purpose is a great one to start with because it is so refined .

It's very predictable .

It's gonna give you the result that you're after beast .

So there's like three standard ones you can get in the US and around the world , they're called different things in different places .

You have active dry , you have instant yeast and you also have fresh here .

We have all the different tests for yeast .

So to see what would the result be in the bread ?

Could we really taste or see a difference in the rising in terms of speed .

How big the doughs got all of that ?

So we bloomed the fresh and the active dry .

We did not bloom the rapid because it is not recommended to do .

So we all use the exact same amount of ingredients .

We use flour from the same bag but all of ours were different levels of soft .

The instant was super hard .

The active dry was kind of the mama bear of them .

It was like kind of the in between and the fresh was like super soft .

So because we want to have a little bit more control over our dough , we wanted to use active dry .

So to wake it up , we're going to put it in a liquid and the sugar and butter are gonna act as food for the bees to make our blooming liquid .

We're going to start with some warm milk .

We're gonna add a little bit of warm water and melted butter to that .

We're gonna add sugar .

Sugar is gonna be the main thing that's gonna give our yeast some food to really quickly start to work in , goes our yeast .

We're gonna stir it to make sure that the Granules can evenly dissolve and be mixed immediately with all those ingredients .

So we're gonna leave that for about five minutes and it should look something like this .

If you don't see anything close to this , you should throw everything away and start with some new yeast .

Your yeast might be old or dead .

So once we've bloomed our yeast , we're gonna set it off to the side and goes the flour and the salt and we're gonna just super quickly incorporate the salt into the flour again .

So it doesn't like hit a huge block of salt .

When the yeast goes in , we're gonna add an egg to this dough that's gonna further enrich our dough .

It's also gonna give us a little bit of color , a bit of extra flavor and a bit of of add it to our bloomed yeast mix and then just quickly as you can pour it into the flour .

And I'm gonna use the same knife just to hydrate as much of the flour as quickly as I can .

So once I'm getting it to a roughly kind of shaggy dough , I can pour it out of my bowl without making too huge of a mess onto a clean floured surface and really start to make this into a dough .

The dough is definitely on the water side .

So you want to keep a little bit of bench flour and that just means a little extra flour around to add to your dough as you go to make it a little bit easier to work with .

And so that it's not too wet , the cool thing with bread is that we is better unlike pastry , which you want to be on the dryer side .

So it's pretty fun to work with .

It's pretty easy to work with as well .

But if it's really sticking to your hands or to the surface , all you need to do is add a little bit more flour and it'll be much easier to work with .

And depending on like how old your flour is , uh , how big your egg is .

I mean , there's so much that's going in here , you're probably gonna need more flour than anything before you go too far .

Get all these extra bits off your hand .

So when you first start rolling , because no matter what , like you're going to have a little bit of those scraggly bits on your hands .

So get those off and start incorporating those into your dough early so that you don't have like big scraggly bits later on again because you're going to be needing for a good 10 minutes or so , those will pretty easily be incorporated into the dough .

But if you wait too long , then you'll just have like a big chunk .

So kneading , this is one thing that I think people tend to under do almost always .

So if you're doing this by hand , I'm , I , I see it's like almost impossible to over need .

If you are using a stand mixer , it is possible and what will start to happen and it will kind of fall apart .

It'll just turn almost like liquidy and that means that you've just overworked the gluten and you over needed it .

But by hand , trust me , you're probably underneath it .

What I like to do is I like to roll the dough on top of itself and then push it out , rotate , fold it over itself , push again , rotate , pull over itself and push so you can just continue to do this .

I like to work kind of in a bit of a ball shape , always making kind of the shape of a roll .

And once I'm getting the dough to a place that I kind of like , I'm actually going to switch to this heart method .

It just makes it a little bit more efficient .

So you just roll it back and then by the time you've come down towards you , it's in the shape of a cylinder almost and then you roll it the other way .

So you're making sure that you're really evenly needing out the dough and not totally exhausting one of your arms .

And to tell that you've needed enough , a really easy thing to do is to pull off a piece of the dough and make a little bit of a window pane with it and stretch it out .

If it doesn't tear , you can actually see those strands of gluten that have developed .

And that should give you a pretty good indicator that your dough is ready to rise or you can push into the dough .

And if it bounces back at you , you've developed enough gluten and the dough is ready to sit .

Once we're ready , we're going to oil a bowl , put our dough inside of it , make sure that it's covered in the oil as well .

So it doesn't stick and then cover with cling film to rise in a warm area and then to get all of the dough and flour and everything off the bench , these bench scrapers are amazing and such an easy like cooks tool to definitely get one as this cling film kind of fogs up .

That's actually all this gas being released that we talked about .

That's the yeast working .

So , so all of that rising in that dough is creating a little bit of like condensation within the bowl .

So this is actually a rise .

The proof is gonna happen after it's doubled in size .

If you want a slow rise , you can put the dough in your fridge .

Whereas if leaving it out in a warm place , it'll happen a lot quicker with active dry yeast .

It should double in size in about an hour , take off the clang .

And so we punch it pretty much just because it's fun , but also because we're gonna turn out the dough and even out all those bubbles in the dough .

So I'm gonna need it again for a few minutes and kind of even out the different texture within the dough and then we're gonna cut it into pieces .

So if you want super exact dough balls , you should definitely invest in a scale and weigh them out .

Another trick if you want really even size bread rolls is to always work in half .

So the easiest thing for me is I just continue to cut things in half .

So I have this big piece , I'm going to cut this piece in half and just continue to cut these pieces in half .

And for me , it's easier to make them into round balls again .

Um Again , just to make sure that I'm being super , you know , precise with my cut to get even size bread rolls .

But now that we have our dough divided into its pieces , it's time to shape them into their cute little rolls .

So before I even start shaping it , I'm gonna start to need the little pieces so you can do a few different things .

You can need it the same way that we were talking about before and press it into a little disk first and then take the outer pieces and push them into the center .

But what you're really trying to do when it's all said and done , regardless of whatever technique that you use is you're trying to make the bottom of the piece that you're rolling top .

So what we really want is to gather all the outside pieces in the middle and then make the top of it top .

So what I'm doing here is I'm using my hands to kind of pinch from like the middle of the roll to the very bottom .

And when I do that , I'm also rotating my hands .

So every time I'm doing that , I'm squeezing the bottom and making sure that I'm making the top top and making all the ugly pieces on the bottom .

So taking time with shaping , like you've gotten it this far , you know , make sure that they're really beautiful when it's all said and done .

But this is also something that you can definitely outsource .

I always get made fun of it tasty because I'm always trying to like give people jobs to do .

But , you know , if you have a whole bunch of people coming over , this is definitely an easy way to get everyone involved and playing with dough is very satisfying .

There's just something about it that's very , like soothing and very like soulful in some ways .

So there's no one who's gonna say no .

I mean , it's so fun to do .

So , once we're happy with all of our shaped dough , I'm gonna place them on a parchment lined baking sheet and you want them to be a little bit far , but not too far because I really want these to touch a little bit .

That's the dinner roll .

Look like you got to have it .

I know you're eager , you've gotten these all and they're perfect shapes so they need to rise just a little bit more .

So the first one was the rise and now our rolls are going to proof we're gonna cover it up with clay and then let's sit for 30 minutes an hour .

We want them to rise again .

We've been a little bit like needy with the dough if you guys have had like too much time together .

So now the dough needs a little bit of space uh , before it'll really perform and look how pillowy those are .

I mean , seriously , like , look how much they've risen and they're now touching but not too much .

Last thing .

So if you watched our pie episode , we tested a whole bunch of different washes to put on dough before it goes in the oven .

And honestly , the egg is just super easy and classic and gives you a really great shiny brown and for that dinner roll shine , like you need an egg wash .

Take your time like these are delicate little babies at this point .

So if you come in real hot with that brush and just like really poke them , they will deflate it a little bit .

Now , this is totally optional , but we are going to top ours with a little bit of sea salt mostly because I just could never get enough salt .

The season high , the higher you go , it'll be a more even distribution .

If you see them too close to the roll , it'll all kind of get in one clump .

I'm sure you've experienced that before .

Just at a few different temperatures .

So bread ideally does need a pretty high heat , but these are little baby rolls .

So we did have to throw back the heat a little bit .

We ended up with 3 75 .

Wow .

And that gives us like the perfect amount of brown while cooking the rolls through freshly baked bread is just one of those things that , I mean , the crumb on this , the texture here .

I mean , you could sleep on this .

It's like a pillow .

I mean , look at that .

It's got a great sweet savory flavor on the inside .

Got the sesame seeds .

You can do garlic butter , you can do , I mean anything or you can do nothing and just sop it up with some gravy or butter or jam or it cannot be overstated .

How much this fourth utensil will contribute to your next dinner party .

I'm not eating anything else's holiday season , aside from bread rolls , make these bread rolls .

Tag us in your photos because I need to know that the world believes in bread rolls as much as we believe in bread rolls .