Foolproof 30 minute dinner rolls recipe (2024)

FAQs

Why did my dinner rolls come out heavy? ›

Why are my dinner rolls not fluffy? If your dinner rolls aren't fluffy it could be because of one of two reasons. Either, you added too much flour or you possibly used all bread flour. Alternately, not giving your dinner rolls enough time to proof and get puffy before baking could yield dense rolls.

Too much flour, or not the right kind, could be to blame. Dough made only from flour with a high or even average amount of protein (like bread flour or all-purpose flour) can become tough from overmixing. Protein gives bread structure in the form of gluten—the more you mix and move the dough, the more gluten you get.

Add Milk

To make your bread soft and fluffy, another trick used by commercial bakers is replacing water with milk. Milk has fats which make bread softer.

Potato Flakes or Potato Water

Starch helps the dough by trapping the gas from the yeast in the dough and makes the bubbles stronger. This helps the bread to rise and be lighter and fluffier. If you are boiling potatoes, you can use the unsalted water in place of the water in your bread recipe to help out the yeast.

Cast iron can be used on the stove top or directly in the oven. If you don't have a large 11 inch cast iron pan, you can use a glass baking dish sprayed with nonstick spray. A 9×13 size would work well. It's best to have the rolls all touching each other when you arrange them in the pan, and I'll tell you why…

Avoid adding too much extra flour to the dough.

These ingredients slow down gluten development and can make the dough a little sticky. Your instinct might be to add extra flour; however, any extra flour will create a denser, tougher roll instead of the light, fluffy, soft dinner roll we want.

Arrange the Dough For Baking

Arrange the rolls closer to each other, with enough room for them to expand into each other as they rise and bake. More traditional dinner rolls might be arranged on a baking sheet with lots of space in between so you get little orbs of golden brown goodness that don't touch.

You can also use all-purpose in many bun or roll recipes, which tend to have lower hydration and rely less on strong gluten and more on butter and sugar for texture. (Though bread flour can still give you a fluffier, almost cotton-candy-like texture in most buns and rolls.)

If the area is too warm, bread will rise too fast and begin cooking before the yeast has finished acting. This will impart a "yeasty" taste to the dough that will be transferred to the finished baked loaf. Using old ingredients (rancid nuts, "old" shortening) will cause yeast breads to taste old or have an "off" taste.

Flat flavor in bread is almost always because of not enough salt. I agree with you that you don't have enough. About 2% of the flour weight. In your recipe with 5 cups of flour (600g) that would be just over 2tsp of table salt (12g).

When to put egg wash on dinner rolls? ›

In baking, many recipes call for an egg wash to be brushed on the baked goods before it goes into the oven. The purpose of this is to give the final product a golden brown color that is slightly shiny. Egg washes can make the final product look more professional, a bit crispier, or act as a binder."

Butter basting: Rolls can be brushed with butter before, during, or after baking. While it doesn't brown the surface as much as egg wash will, it does promote browning and adds a lot of flavor.

Active dry yeast and instant yeast can generally be used interchangeably, one-for-one (although active dry yeast may be slower to rise). So if a recipe calls for instant yeast and you use active dry yeast instead, you may want to consider adding an extra 10 to 15 minutes for the rise time.

Different Flours

The main ingredient is flour in bread making and it's not a surprise to find that the incorrect kind can make your bread heavy and dense. For baking light and fluffy bread, it is necessary to choose flour that has high levels of protein.

Does Rising Bread Affect Its Texture? For a fluffy bread texture, the key is to let the bread rise long enough.

“The first thing that springs to mind,” Bertinet says, “is that your dough is probably too cold.” Or, put another way, the water you're using isn't warm enough. “It's vital you give the yeast a helping hand, otherwise it'll just slumber lazily,” he says, adding that your water/ flour/salt/yeast ratio is also crucial.