Application Guide

Technique: How to Shape and Bake Soft Dinner Rolls
Sure we love focaccia and fresh loaves of rustic bread for dinner. But American-style
soft dinner rolls, shaped into a host of pretty, traditional shapes, never go out of style
or favor. The bread machine makes the dough a snap. (You can even use a commercial
bread machine mix if you like, but the rolls won’t be quite as good.) Piping hot with
melted butter, dinner rolls need no embellishment. They are meant to melt in your
mouth and to be a bit chewy at the same time. I was a lucky child—growing up, my
mother kept all sorts of fancy dinner rolls in the freezer and brought some out every
night for dinner. We had finger rolls with poppy seeds, crescent-shaped butterhorns,
cloverleafs, or just plain round puffy rolls. I especially liked the fantans, which, like a
deck of cards, could be pulled apart in tender stages.
Dinner roll dough is not the same as bread dough; it is a bit more del-
icate and soft. The doughs have butter or margarine, milk, and sometimes egg for rich-
ness. They don’t need to be worked hard like dough for a loaf, so dinner roll recipes
call for all-purpose flour. Not as much gluten is needed. They have a fine crumb.
While the hand shaping is not hard, there is a bit of precision involved or else they will
look lopsided, even though little irregularities will disappear as the rolls puff in the
oven. Look for the other dinner roll recipes in this book, Virginia Light Rolls, an all—
white flour version, and Soft Whole Wheat Dinner Rolls, for similar doughs that can
also be baked in the beautiful shapes below. A basket of homemade dinner rolls with
your lunch or supper of roast turkey, ham, pork loin, or chicken spells, well, you know,
old-fashioned comfort and a grand day of baking.
Parker House Rolls
Makes 16 rolls
581