I am in charge of the dinner rolls for Thanksgiving dinner again this year. This is the third year running, and dammit, this time I want them to turn out well. Two years ago, I tried making 100% whole wheat rolls. They were relatively tasty, but they looked like hockey pucks. From now on, whole wheat is being reserved for my own family. For Thanksgiving, I want something puffy, yeasty, light, and delicious.
Last year, I tried a white-flour based recipe, and they still didn’t rise correctly. They were okay, still not great. I want great. I’ve tried Bittman’s recipe from How to Cook Everything; nothing special. I tried a recipe I found on the Internet incorporating a quarter-cup of honey. Those tasted pretty good but again, they didn’t rise exactly right, and they came out looking like biscuits. Appearance is important here. My aunts, uncles, and cousins will not eat dinner rolls if they do not LOOK like attractive and tasty dinner rolls. Experience has proved me out on this.
Give me recipes. Give me tips. I’ve perennially had problems with the rise; is more yeast called for? I’m letting them rise in a warm place with no drafts. I am willing to experiment in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving. Please, help me! I am begging you! If I screw up the dinner rolls again, they may just blacklist me and go back to making the Pillsbury crescent rolls from a tube!
That was going to be my suggestion. Tubed rolls are just fine for a large group. Or hit the bakery/deli section at the local supermarket. I love to bake, but for Thanksgiving, easy beats home-made every time.
Well, you have about 5+ weeks, so you’ve got some time to experiment until you find a dough you’d like to use. I’d like to suggest that you look into some fancier-looking shapes (which aren’t really all that difficult).
F’rinstance, casseroles. Before the final rise of the dough, you roll the dough into a bunch of ping-pong-sized balls. Place three into each greased cup of a standard muffin tin, then cover them with a dish towel and let them finish the rise.
You can also roll them into balls the correct size for the muffin tins, flatten them, and fold them in half, then put them into the tins (fold side down), and let them rise. This makes a Parkerhouse.
Let them rise normally in the tins, and snip a little “X” in the top right before you bake them, and you have a very nice looking roll.
Brush the tops of the rolls with melted butter before you put them into the oven.
And if you remove them from the oven about 15-20 minutes before the scheduled end of the baking time, you can bring them with you as brown-n-serves. You just finish the baking process in the kitchen they’re going to be served out of, and you get to serve them piping HOT.
The Problem: Quickie recipes produce rolls that aren’t much better than the rolls you buy at the supermarket because they don’t allow enough time for the dough to develop much flavor. But homemade rolls—made right—are often too bothersome for an overextended chef.
The Goal: We wanted to develop a largely make-ahead recipe that would deliver rich, soft, tender, airy, semisweet, pull-apart all-American dinner rolls.
The Solution: First we needed to optimize flavor and texture by getting the ingredients just right. *
I serve these at family gatherings. Completely inoffensive to those suspicious of “exotic foods”.
Feather Rolls
from the Fannie Farmer Cook Book (12th edition revised by Marion Cunningham)
yield: 12 rolls
1 pkg dry yeast
4 T soft butter
1 T Sugar
3/4 t salt
1 egg
3/4 c warm milk
2 c white flour
Stir Yeast into 1/4 c warm water and let stand for 5 minutes to dissolve. Mix butter, sugar, salt, egg, milk and dissolved yeast in large bowl and beat until smooth. Add the flour and beat vigorously until well blended. Cover and let rise ina warm spot for about 1 hour. Stir down and fill buttered muffin tins half full. over and let rise for 30 minutes. Preheat oven to 400ºF. Bake for 15 - 20 minutes.
Just a little update here: We’re Cook’s Illustrated subscribers, so I dug out the September issue that parsnip mentioned. I finally got around to trying the recipe out over this weekend. (It calls for a 24-48 hour rise in the refrigerator, so some advance planning is necessary.)
They were great. I mean, really great. The only thing is that they didn’t rise quite as much as the pictures in the magazine indicated they should, so next time I am going to go ahead and use instant yeast like the recipe calls for, rather than active dry (which is what we had on hand). I did increase the amount of yeast by 25% per the instructions, but I still think they could have risen a smidge better. Still, these are definitely the rolls we’ll be doing on Thanksgiving. Ha! Finally rolls that are better than the brown & serve from the grocery store that my aunt and uncle bring every year!
I’m laughing with tears in my eyes, but the tears aren’t all from the laugh. You just made me think of my late mother. Over the years she got better about it. Sometimes we just had rolls with very dark brown bottoms. And sometimes with no bottoms at all, since they had to be cut off.
MsWhatsit, have you tried out any of the recipes or techniques mentioned in this thread, yet? Because I have the same problems with hockey puck-style rolls as you do, and even following the recipes exactly, I often fail. It’s very frustrating. Since moving to Seattle, bread has been the bane of my baking existence. I didn’t move into the mountains, so elevation isn’t the issue… grr.
Anyway, before I give these Doper recipes a shot, I wanted to see if you’d had any success with them. I have to start practicing; I don’t have to make them for Thanksgiving, but my parents are coming for Christmas, and I will have to make them, then… :eek:
Anastasaeon: Yes, as per my previous post in this thread. The recipe from the 9/06 issue of Cook’s Illustrated is the bomb diggety, and got rave reviews from my sister and brother-in-law, both of whom say they are very much looking forward to seeing them again at Thanksgiving.
You know, I really think that part of the problem with some roll recipes is that the ones that are simply adapted from bread recipes with no major changes aren’t very good. Rolls are different from bread, and if you just take a bread recipe and divide it up into muffin tins or whatever, it’s not going to be a great dinner roll; it’s going to be bread in muffin tins. I am very happy with the CI recipe, however, and would recommend it to anybody. I would suggest that if you’re going to make it for a crowd, you give it a practice run first, though, as there is quite a bit of lead time involved and you might need to do some finagling with yeast quantity or rise time depending on humidity, temperature, etc.
The recipe from the 9/06 issue of Cook’s Illustrated is the bomb diggety, and got rave reviews from my sister and brother-in-law, both of whom say they are very much looking forward to seeing them again at Thanksgiving.